For the last several years robotics companies such as Norway’s Prox Dynamics AS have been developing tiny, helicopter-like drones for military and law enforcement surveillance. Known as personal reconnaissance systems, this new generation of miniature UAVs hit the mediascape the last few hours, as the British army announced the newish technology. Continue reading The Black Hornet →

This is my Xenophilia blog where I post various occasional writings as well as links to my publications, and by invitation to current projects. Many of the older posts have been lost and the posts I am reposting are not necessarily in the order they were written. Hopefully, going forward from June 2015 this will be resolved.

The links at the top of the page can be used to navigate to my biography page and to various current projects.

If you are looking for my academic writing, try academic.edu. In the future I will add additional links to ongoing projects, e.g. my work on stand-up comedy and masculinity, as it becomes more developed and interesting.

I’m reading David Graeber’s pamphlet Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), and ran across the following provocative passage:

Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is the might be called Low Theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project. Mainstream social science actually isn’t much help here, because normally in mainstream social science this sort of thing is generally classified as “policy issues,” and no self-respecting anarchist would have anything to do with these (Graeber 2004, Loc. 89).

Continue reading Low Theory →

Read an A.O. Scott’s New York Times essay this morning: Is Our Art Art Equal to the Challenges of Our Times? (Nov. 27, 2014).

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/arts/is-our-art-equal-to-the-challenges-of-our-times.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region&_r=0

And I found it nauseating. Scott is probably my least-loved liberal critic. His commentary has a way of being preachy, terminally middle class, blandly questioning and nostalgic.

Continue reading Art of Critique →