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.
Ageing for Beginners: An Unrepresentative Guide
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?
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"I wish to be cremated": On Writing My Un-Islamic Will
By

It was raining heavily that May morning in 2019. I reluctantly walked into the law firm’s office in Auckland, greeted Joy, the receptionist and legal assistant, and took a seat, waiting for the lawyer to witness my will. I heard him talking to a client in French, which I’d studied many years ago at...

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Online Learning in the Time of Corona
By

I grew up in the aftermath of Nasser’s Egypt, where public education was made free for all. For me, learning has always been remote… It began with walks to the public libraries, and random flaneur strollings in Old Cairo’s Sur al-Azbakiyya, a treasure hunt for books, old and new, in a modest...

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When the Imperial Baroque State Is Not Sufficiently Baroque
By
It is difficult to envision the sheer quantity of pearls dredged up from the New World by sixteenth-century colonists. An average of a 1,000 pounds of pearl per year in tax revenue alone. The social, political, and ecological challenges of producing such richness is the subject of a fascinating book by historian Molly Warsh reviewed here.   
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Earliest Gestures
By
Can you recall your earliest gesture? Perhaps not consciously, but traces of these first attempts to orient our bodies in space linger in our everyday experiences. 

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