Jeff Strabone is a native New Yorker and professor of English. He also holds degrees in history and political science. Besides his scholarship and activism, he holds a U.S. patent for a voting system. His writing alternates between British and American spelling in the hope that others will share his deeply ambivalent relationship to standardization. Email: jeffstrabone@gmail.com
by Jeff Strabone Kristina Williamson is a multimedia visual artist who can find the erotic in a Cheese Curl, the surreal in the every day, and signs of globalization in the empty village left behind. Her photographs span the globe from her small-town origins somewhere in America to the islands of Greece and Spain. Like…
by Jeff Strabone Another U.S. presidential election is upon us, and once again the electoral college looms large as a threat to the legitimacy of government and people's faith in democracy. On the eve of what may be another split between the electoral college and the nationwide popular vote total, we are no closer to…
by Jeff Strabone The electoral college is one of those things that few people understand all that well, yet almost everyone can tell you why we’ve been unable to get rid of it: the small states have blocked efforts to amend the Constitution to abolish it because they believe that it amplifies their voting power.…
by Jeff Strabone Brown v. Board of Education. The Voting Rights Act. Miranda v. Arizona. Roe v. Wade. Texas v. Johnson. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Same-sex marriage. Looked at one way, the past several decades in the United States have been an almost uninterrupted series of victories for the American left and its activist…
by Jeff Strabone In 1977, when the Stranglers asked the immortal question, 'What ever happened to those heroes?', they were wondering not about super-heroes but, rather, more earthly characters like Leon Trotsky and Lenny Bruce. Today, I want to ask about that other group of heroes, the ones being strangled by the corporations who control…
by Jeff Strabone When Cy Twombly died last week on July 5, my first thought was that the greatest living painter had left us. That's because I am a simple fellow amused by such games as anointing The Greatest Living Painter and The Most Delicious Dinner Entrée in New York. (It's the duck at The…
by Jeff Strabone It used to be the case that the earth took little notice of the rise and fall of empires and republics. Fields were burned, livestock slaughtered, wells polluted, but sooner or later life returned. That is not necessarily the case anymore, as recent eco-catastrophes in the Gulf of Mexico and Japan remind…
by Jeff Strabone What happens when a great artist in one medium exhibits work in another? 'Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art asks us to consider this question. For forty-some years, Serra has developed a non-representational sculptural practice based chiefly on physical properties of mass, weight, and counterbalance, as opposed…
by Jeff Strabone One way that novels and films differ from the real world is that events that mark the end of a narrative fiction tend to be just the beginning in the non-fictional world. Case in point: revolutions. A revolution is never the end of the story in real life. If the razzle-dazzle of…
by Jeff Strabone Why is it that people who argue against the government's role in the economy don't likewise advocate for the flip side: that corporations should not be allowed to influence government? Is there an industrialized democracy more in need of checking corporate power over government policy than the United States? I expect that…
by Jeff Strabone The more I read about the so-called enthusiasm gap among Democrats—the idea that they have so lost their enthusiasm for President Obama that they somehow won't be able to vote in next month's Congressional and local elections—the more I wonder about the lack of public skepticism about its existence. True, one hears…
by Jeff Strabone One of the duties of the modern nation-state is persuasion. Each state aims to keep its citizens convinced of the legitimacy of its rule. The state may be run chiefly for the enrichment of a few at the cost of the many, but the endurance of the state is widely thought to…
by Jeff Strabone Two weeks ago, the NBC television program 30 Rock devoted an episode to a theme on many Americans’ minds: executive pay (episode 59, broadcast October 15, 2009). In the episode, Kenneth the Page (played by Jack McBrayer) discovered that division head Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) had received a huge corporate bonus with…
by Jeff Strabone What kind of space is cyberspace? Of all the things we take for granted, cyberspace is near the top of the list. The promise of the internet in the twenty-first century is to make everything always available to everyone everywhere. All of human culture and achievement, the great and the not so…
by Jeff Strabone While the world waits for the second Iranian Revolution, it’s important to recall that Iran is not just a place of political turmoil, nuclear ambitions, and theocratic dictatorship. It is also a place of great poetry and cinema, as the work of Abbas Kiarostami reminds us. How timely then that he has…
by Jeff Strabone In the twelve years that the George Bushes occupied the White House, I can think of only one outstanding instance when their odd cocktail of nepotism, ineptitude, and lackadaisy went down easy and yielded a savoury, enduring aftertaste. It happened in 1990 when Bush père outsourced his first Supreme Court appointment to…
by Jeff Strabone Two famous men known for reinventing themselves have spent most of this decade in hiding: Osama bin Ladin and David Bowie. Away from the public eye, Bin Ladin has been busy releasing mixtapes of varying quality over the past few years, but Bowie not so much. Bin Ladin's listeners, at the CIA…
by Jeff Strabone The twenty-first century may still be fairly new, but its nameless first decade—the naughties? the zeroes?—is drawing to a close and it’s time to start taking stock. I have noticed something happening in the art of this decade that may indicate a deep change in contemporary attitudes towards the past and its…
by Jeff Strabone It would be easy to laugh off Jennifer Aniston's problems. She's rich, famous, and able to have her pick of nearly all the men of the world and all the scripts of Hollywood. And what she's famous for is being funny. Her television sitcom ran for ten years, her movie comedies are…