Author / Gabriel T Rubin
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Reparations for Conservatives
If conservative Americans and their elected representatives thought of their history of racism as a financial debt that must be repaid to their creditors, would they be more likely to support reparations for African-Americans? Paying off the national debt, though not headline news at the moment, has been the conservative rallying cry since the twilight…
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Ferguson and the Fight for 15
The McDonald’s on West Florrisant Avenue in Ferguson became a notorious corner of a notorious city for a violent altercation between journalists and over-militarized police during the protests of mid-August. But the Ferguson McDonald’s has also come to symbolize something deeper than just confrontations between cops and civilians: the emergence of a new labor-civil rights…
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Tainted by the Nobel
BY GABRIEL RUBIN When Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, he quipped, “I was not aware at the time that the Nobel Prize is awarded without consulting the opinion of the recipient.” Few besides Sartre have ever dreamed of turning down a Nobel, widely recognized, in the West at least,…
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Chancellor Wrighton’s Fear Mongering
BY GABRIEL RUBIN The fire is coming, or so they tell us. Since August, the administration of Washington University in St. Louis has taken a bifurcated approach to the protest movement that has emerged in the wake of unarmed teenager Michael Brown’s killing. When the protesters were demonstrating mainly in the suburb of Ferguson itself,…
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Fascists and Futurists: The Art of Violence
BY GABRIEL RUBIN Typically, when someone crashes his car into a ditch, he does not tend to exclaim, “I felt my heart pierced deliciously by the red-hot iron of joy.” Unless, of course, that car crash leads him to create a whole new genre of art. The poor driver in question, the Italian poet F.T.…
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“Isis” before ISIS
By Gabriel Rubin Before 1994, “O.J.” existed in a state of blissful innocence, more likely to be mentioned at a breakfast table than in a criminal court. Swastikas used to adorn Chinese pottery, and Gulf Coast parents happily christened their daughters “Katrina” and “Rita.” And, until several months ago, “Isis” was my favorite Bob Dylan…
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Blood on Their Doorposts
BY GABE RUBIN Despite recent investor bullishness and cocky parliamentary speeches from Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Spain remains mired in a profound economic crisis that has hurled its citizens into dire straits. While the overall unemployment rate stands at the American Great Depression level of 25 percent, youth unemployment, at over 50 percent, threatens to…
