An island city made of steel, glass and concrete, Manhattan is also a city of nearly infinite signs and spectacular symbols, many of them subversive. Indeed, Manhattan is a paradise for the study of semiotics.…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
He’s the toughest of acts to follow. Moreover, no one will ever be as controversial as he has been. Indeed, during his decades-long tenure at Sonoma State University, President Ruben Armiñana, altered the face of…
I’ve never really liked Hillary, whom I still think of as Bill’s wife, and, while I would rejoice if a genuine feminist finally moved into the White House, I don’t cotton to the idea of…
Where to eat? What to eat? And when to eat? Questions about food and eating proliferate endlessly. Each day brings new challenges, new desires and perhaps even new fears in an era of food insecurity.…
Charles Dudley Warner, the nineteenth-century American writer and Mark Twain’s pal, coined two memorable quips: “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it; and “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” Indeed, campaigns, causes, elections…
After twenty-four years at the helm of the institution that he has radically transformed, Sonoma State University President, Ruben Armiñana, will retire on July 1, 2016. But first he has to run a kind of…
When I was in college, I learned about ambiguity by reading the novels and the essays of Henry James, the Anglo-American author who was born in New York and who died in London, England in…
Nothing – not drones, bombs, apps, or awards – stops the white male North American intellectual in his quest to nail the nature of the times in which we live. Super-intellectual soars again and again,…
Every since the abominable attacks on Paris I’ve been emailing my closest French friends, Jean-Francois and Virginie, for first-hand news of the tragedy that unfolded there. From what I understand, they’ve been carrying on as…