Salon.com > Malcolm Harris

Rule-breaking isn’t anarchy!

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 23:00:00 +0000

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012 WAS SUPPOSED TO BE a day of reckoning on the left: best-selling liberal author Chris Hedges would finally be called to account for his opportunistic attack on anarchists within Occupy Wall Street. In a piece posted widely around the progressive internet press, Hedges called Black Bloc protesters — a reference to people associated with small-scale property destruction who show up to marches all in black — "the cancer of the Occupy movement," asserting that the movement would be better off turning window breakers over to the police. After a few aborted attempts, Hedges would sit down to defend himself mano a mano against a bona fide anarchist in front of a large audience at the CUNY Graduate Center. Brian Traven sat on the other side of Hedges: a member of the anti-authoritarian publishing collective CrimethInc., an organization associated more with the image of smashed Seattle Starbucks locations than any of their actual texts.

Suicidal dogs and bipolar wolves

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 22:56:00 +0000

New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris talked with science historian Laurel Braitman about her work on animal personality and taste. Braitman is a 2012 TED fellow, finishing her PhD at M.I.T., and the author of the forthcoming book "Animal Madness."

Malcolm Harris: Anthropomorphism has become this huge sin for scientists studying non-human animals, but you haven’t been shy about using the phrase “animal personality.” Why foreground the contradiction/controversy like that? Do biologists and anthropologists need to reexamine the taboo?

Laurel Braitman: Anthropomorphism – the ascription of human characteristics to other animals – has been problematized for a long time, certainly within the behavioral sciences. I think it’s high time we do away with the taboo. Some of the people doing the most interesting work about other animal minds have already done this, because it’s limiting. It’s impossible to look at them without using a human mind. If we’re trying to understand the behavior of another animal who is in some ways very similar to us and we refuse to use our own experience as a place to come from, I think that’s actually poor science. If we’re looking at a gorilla and that gorilla is acting sad in some of the same ways that we know ourselves to act sad, then refusing to acknowledge that link makes us less apt to understand the gorilla at hand.

“Breaking Bad”: White supremacist fable?

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:54:00 +0000

If you judged by TV and movies alone, you’d think “pure” drugs were seeping out of American society’s every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents gone rogue. Even if suburban 15-year-olds don’t ask their dealers for THC percentages after seeing Oliver Stone’s Savages — and smart money says some of them are — craft beer isn’t the only boutique intoxicant buzzing around the nation’s subconscious. In the shadow of the high-fructose-corn-syrup backlash, everyone from the Olive Garden to the proverbial Brooklyn popsicle startup is trying to cash in on craftsmanship. Meanwhile, screenwriters (clever advertisers in their own right) have found that the easiest way to hook viewers on drug-dealer protagonists is to sell crack as small-batch artisanal rock cocaine.