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.


 

Party Like It's 2009
For Christmas my parents gave me a Kindle. I've been downloading all sorts of bad-for-the-brain but oh-so-fun fiction by Charlaine Harris, Jim Butcher, etc. Haven't thought boo about Russian poetry for more than a week.What to write about then? Inspired by Alec Hanley Bemis's recent post, I've decided to offer my own end-of-the-year list. Maybe others here at Arcade will do the same?
The Hermeneutics of Babies
Babies are usually the stuff of private life, clichés, and endearing memories that we check out as we set foot on campus grounds. Yet babies are the greatest--and arguably the cutest--hermeneutic subjects.
MJ -- by Kehinde Wiley & on fire
I'll admit it. I get off on death. Skeletons. X'd eyes. No, not the phenomenon itself, but certainly the aftermath -- the way it makes you consider what comes ahead and what came before. It's not a kink but a forced form of contemplation.
How Kind of You to Let Me Come
This week I'm far from the mountains, orcas, and raincoat-clad hipsters of the Pacific Northwest. To visit family, I've traveled to a Midwestern cornfield. I've brought along Ivan Turgenev's play Mesiats v derevne (A Month in the Country) (1850) to keep me company.
The historical problem of fundamentalism
José María asked: Do "fundamentalism" and "moderation" take on the same "connotations" (to use your word) when the "doctrinaire faithful" are seen as existing within a so-called "pre-political" realm (they are thus gathered as an "ecclesia" proper) as they do when the "state" makes its appearance as "the" overarching and all-encompassing form of community?