Interventions

Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge. 

Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.


 

Dark and mysterious etching featuring four human figures with bat-like flying apparatuses.
By
Richard Read
We all know we can move between ages: the bank manager and the brain surgeon screaming in the members' stand at the football club, the sombre academic taking to ecstatic dance at the post-conference night club, the OAP who falls in love, the police people hiding tats beneath their uniforms. Does this pin-ball capacity to flick between several different ages we carry ready and waiting their turn within ourselves serve any evolutionary purpose?
Image of East River from the Shelton Hotel by Georgia O’Keeffe’s
“A Basis of Permanent Peace”: 20th-Century Lessons of Global War and the 21st-Century Promise of Climate Reparations
Chastened by global war, a group of American foreign policymakers in the mid-1940s turned to ideas of rebalancing transnational patterns of resource use more equally to prevent future world wars. Although this vision was ultimately defeated, their story offers lessons for today amid calls for climate reparations to address global inequality, climate crisis, and militarized geopolitics.