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Will the new Jurassic Park movie be an anti-GMO adventure?

By Michael Schulson

…ons to a scene featuring an earthy man in a brown vest, with fashionable scruff–Chris Pratt, looking like a cross between Indiana Jones and your middle school biology teacher. “They just went and made a new dinosaur?” Brown Vest asks sagely. “Probably not a good idea.” Brown Vest frets further about the “dinosaur they cooked up in that lab.” Then the trailer starts to get bloody. GMO on the loose! You can watch it yourself. The Cubit editors are l…

“1913: Seeds of Conflict”: New Doc Explores Little-Known History of Palestine

By Shaul Magid

…lation lived). It also shows a bustling multiethnic and largely peaceful Jerusalem at a time before the four quarters (Armenian, Christian, Jewish, Muslim) separated its inhabitants into veritable enclaves. And like many of the films that would come later, it rarely depicts Arabs—who at that time were the large majority of the population. These were films meant to promote the common Zionist myth first coined by the British Jew Israel Zangwill, “A…

Virtual Book Burning and Its Consequences

By Laurie Patton

…Antiochus mandated that the Torah scrolls be torn in pieces and burnt in Jerusalem. (The Maccabean revolt took place several years later.) In the fourth century, the Emporer Diocletian ordered Christian books burned as a way of stepping up his persecution. And disturbingly closer to the present-day Floridian rhetoric, the Spanish Inquisition famously burned the Qur’an as part of their purifying activities. Book burning can also be a way of forming…

What Does a Moral Economy Look Like for the 99 Percent?

By Jonathan Rosenblum

…plin’s 1915 union anthem, “Solidarity Forever:” “We shall bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.” It aligned with the argument in the final chapter of my book that we can assemble a new labor movement from the wreckage of our present circumstances. But unfortunately—or perhaps, fortunately—labor scholar and activist Stanley Aronowitz had already used the title in an excellent book he wrote in 2000 about the demise and (hoped for) re…

Double Helix: Science & Religion as Cultural Kindling; A Response to The New Republic

By Arri Eisen

…umans or Earth as in any way unique or inevitable. Coyne does set off in a new and productive direction when he calls out many of those attempting the Great Reconciliation who blame the ‘new atheists’ for cultural discord. The line is that all these atheist scientists, Richard Dawkins and his book The God Delusion (2006) being the epitome, are inciting the masses by heaping abuse on religion and proclaiming the superiority of scientific reason. Bu…

Attacks on Science: Predictions for the New Year

By Lauri Lebo

…eceiving substantial tax incentives from the state. Also, get ready in the new year for Congress’ new Republican majority’s touted plans to conduct witch hunts against climate change scientists. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the incoming chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, vowed he will hold hearings on the “Politicization of Science,” to fuel attacks on the reality of climate change. To paraphrase Bette Davis’ great line in…

Goodbye, (Mythic) Columbus

By Ira Chernus

…d nothing about new ideas or worlds within. It was all about a new land, a new world defined strictly geographically. As long as the myth was vibrant, it assured Americans that they needed no sophisticated concepts. The land of the United States itself (which became, in the U.S. version of the myth, synonymous with the “America” Columbus “discovered”) would be the paradise Columbus sought. It would exude all of his mythic qualities: courage, initi…

Chauvin Verdict isn’t a Turning Point in Equal Justice, But it Does Suggest a New Political Norm

By John Stoehr

…ederacy seeking to restore the glories of a past in which “real Americans” lived lives separate and unequal from everyone else’s. That someone like Professor Feldman is writing a piece like his in a publication like Bloomberg Opinion suggests, to me, that respectable white people understand better, or are coming to understand better, that the work of racial justice and equal treatment under the law is, for now, an ongoing endeavor. It suggests a n…

Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

By Sarah Posner

…Is the Religious Left Getting Left Behind by the Beltway Constellation? We live, of course, in the age of the celebrity preacher. In this world there is no better measure of a man of God than his book sales and pew attendance. When I’ve asked insiders like Strider or Jennifer Butler, FIPL’s executive director, who the prominent figures in new face of religious America are (and, moreover, in the wake of Obama’s election, who will get their phone ca…

New Spencer Book Denies Existence of Muhammad

By Hussein Rashid

…ced from the academic field that he uses for his legitimacy. These are not new or provocative questions. They are the bread and butter of the field. There are truly challenging books that come out of the academia, including Steven Wasserstrom’s Between Muslim and Jew and Fred Donner’s Muhammad and the Believers, a recent book that deals with many of the questions Spencer raises, but that actually engages with primary material and that has been cha…