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Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…he Democratic Party as the “Democrat” Party. But Going Rogue was not unpleasant. The second book in the Sarah Palin œuvre, however, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, crosses the line from cute puppy bouncing on his back legs to mangy cur relentlessly humping a visitor’s leg. By all accounts—and especially Palin’s own account—the former governor of Alaska is a busy person these days, appearing regularly on Fox News, starring…

AIDS Anniversary: Thirty is the New Eternity

By Susan Henking

…ed ribbons reappear here, there, and everywhere, sometimes (as recently in San Francisco) in startlingly huge forms. This year, for the 30th, the Smithsonian is undertaking an exposition. Alongside the NASA: Art (another anniversary linked to endings) and the ongoing celebration/commemoration of the Civil War’s 150th, the American History Museum opened an exhibit on June 3 entitled “Archiving the History of an Epidemic: HIV and AIDS, 1985-2009.” I…

News Flash: Buddhist-Majority Countries Just as Complicated as Muslim-Majority

By Haroon Moghul

…under not good, and the country’s most famous democratic personality, Ang San Suu Kyi, has been disturbingly quiet, preferring not to speak out; whatever her reasons may be, her silence is as they say deafening. In addition to the country’s long history of ethnic and sectarian conflict, the plight of its Muslim population continues to worsen, with evidence of human trafficking of Burmese Muslim refugees now surfacing. The violence threatens to sp…

Buddhism And Politics in Myanmar: An Author Interview

By Matthew Walton

…mese monk asked this American to talk with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi about vipassana (insight) meditation, as she had recently started to rediscover this part of her heritage. This was a time of incredible intellectual ferment for her—you can see it in some of her writings and speeches of the period—when she was attempting to weave together Buddhism, democracy, rights, etc. Hearing about these discussions fascinated me, and while the retreat was sort o…

Death Couture: Not For Halloween Only

By Stephen Andes

…gh the agency of her narco-devotees. Local Religion, Globalization, and La Santa Muerte Although the origins of La Santa Muerte developed locally and unrelated to criminality, there is no doubt that the devotion is changing. Like language, symbols as objects of devotion are constantly in flux. Images that once helped to ease the fear of death have now come to embody that fear on both sides of the border. As savvy marketers, drug cartels have appro…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…in 250,000—some of whom are going to have problems, big problems—is just insane. We have to be insane. Terrible,” he said at a rally in Beaumont. It was noted that the 250,000 number was seemingly pulled from thin air, a ghastly specter of invasion at a scale larger than most of our cities. There were later comments about poisonous Skittles made by one of his idiotic children. *** Consider the travel ban clearly targeting Muslim-majority countries…

The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

By Andrew Aghapour

…e replaced by a complex automated system like the University of California San Francisco’s robotic pharmacy, which is capable of producing hundreds of thousands of labeled doses of medicine without error. This is part of the growing trend within large-scale manufacturing to replace teams of people with customized, automated systems. As John Markoff recently detailed, robotic arms are now picking the lettuce we eat, operating the grocery distributi…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quickly ran into a problem that’s been under discussion for at least two th…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…he early afternoon, cameras in hand. It is not uncommon for tourists to outnumber monks in the debate courtyards during this time. This is obviously disruptive, making a spectacle out of a serious educational pursuit. Monastic response to the Chinese government policy of limiting monastic enrollments is at least in part the result of a clash between the secular, materialist, security-concerned worldview of the Chinese state, and the religious, tra…

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

By Annika Brockschmidt

…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…