February 2 through April 24, 2012
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, lobby
Parsons The New School for Design
2 West 13^th Street (off Fifth Avenue)

Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 12:00 to 6:00 p.m.

Exhibition reception
Thursday, February 2, 2012, 6:30 to 9:00 p.m.

Thingness of Energy is a mixed media art installation by Jamie Kruse, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in the lobby of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, a glass-enclosed gallery opening onto Fifth Avenue. It serves as the physical and virtual hub for long-term discussions as well as temporary interactions, events and happenings on The New School’s energy use and its economic, environmental, ethical, urban and artistic implications.

With unprecedented access to the university’s infrastructure and support staff, Kruse has spent six months investigating the flow of energy through various New School buildings. The outcome of her research is a complex, intricate and fragile assemblage of the physical components of energy. The installation is made up of the material conduits of energy – the pipes, wires, switch boxes and tubes through which it flows – as well as samples of some of the energy sources themselves (fossil fuels and coal) in addition to maps and photographs. Mounted on the building’s membrane, i.e. its windows, the installation is visible from both the street and the building’s interior underscoring the correlation between producer of energy – the outside – to consumer of energy – the people in the building.

Energy materials and flows are often hidden in basements or invisibly channeled through pipes and wires. Thingness of Energy is a provocation to consider and directly experience the material realities of energy. Taking The New School’s Climate Action Plan as its point of departure, the project reveals the deep geologic nature and effects of the materials we use to generate and transmit energy. And it underscores the power of deep time – both past and future – as a generator of energy forms and effects.

By bringing into view things of energy that exist both within the walls of The New School and arrive here from far beyond the borders of New York State, Thingness of Energy presents new opportunities to engage several spatial and temporal realities and open questions that are crucial to energy futures. In the artist’s words:

“Much of our daily lives depends on geologic materials that took millennia to form. We generate the massive quantities of heat and light that we use day after day out of the transformed remains of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. These “fossil fuels” will not form again within a timeframe that holds any practical meaning for us as human beings. How might these realities be more effectively communicated to contemporary humans?”

“Humans rarely examine the unimaginably long-term geologic effects that we set into motion when we interact with energy materials. These include irrevocable rearrangements of landscape and biosphere. How might we better grasp the scale of our actions’ impacts?”

“Energy production and transmission infrastructures are vulnerable to forces of change that are often unpredictable and sometimes geologic in scale. Given that our lifestyles depend upon stable and consistent energy supplies, how might we design the where’s, how’s, and material compositions of energy infrastructures so that they flex and reconfigure in response to change?”

At its core, Thingness of Energy poses the question: what if “anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect” became a common design specification for energy production and distribution, policy-making, and infrastructure design?

The presentation is accompanied by several public programs, among them an installation walkthrough and facilities tour on Thursday, February 23, 12:30 p.m. (RSVP required: vlc@newschool.edu) and an energy-driven exchange among New School faculty members from different programs, on Monday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.

For further information, visit
http://smudgestudio.org/smudge/Thingness.html

For inquiries regarding artist-led tours or public classes, please contact vlc@newschool.edu.

* * *

Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer and independent scholar. In 2006 she co-founded (with Elizabeth Ellsworth) smudge studio, based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Recent projects include Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York. Exhibitions have been presented at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Incident Report, Hudson, New York. Kruse has presented her work at Parsons The New School for Design, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Los Angeles, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain, and the California College of Arts. She has been granted residencies with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT; Sundance Preserve; the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Kruse is the author of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog. With Elizabeth Ellsworth, she is currently co-editing a collection of essays entitled “Making the Geologic Now.” Smudge studio is currently represented in a solo show, In the Interest of Time, at the Brazos Gallery, Richland College, Dallas, TX.

*   *   *

Thingness of Energy is an art project by Jamie Kruse, developed and produced in collaboration with The New School’s Office for Sustainability, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The project is supported, in part, by The New School’s Green Fund and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

The Vera List New School Art Collection Writing Awards are awarded annually to New School students to honor the best critical and creative essays inspired by works in the university’s art collection. The awards were established in 1996 by the late Vera List, a life trustee of The New School, and are directed by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2011-2012, in conjunction with the center’s focus theme, submissions for the writing awards should engage works that relate to “thingness“, a multi-faceted inquiry into the nature of our material world.

The writing award celebrates nonfiction and fiction, prose and poetry. All students enrolled in The New School are eligible to submit either a critical or creative text, with a first-place award of $400 and a second-place award of $200 in both categories. Winners are selected by prominent jury members from three New School divisions.

The prize-winning pieces are edited by professional art critics in collaboration with the writers and are published in the annual award poster, designed in collaboration with Parsons Illustration Department. This year, 2000 award posters have been produced and distributed throughout the university campus. They are also available at the center’s office located at 66 West 12th Street, Rm 918.

Winning entries will be featured in a joint celebratory and public reading in April 2012.

THE NEW SCHOOL ART COLLECTION SCAVENGER HUNT
Works related to thingness may or may not be (or depict) objects themselves; they might comment on the material conditions of our lives and environments, or employ methods or media that highlight the depth of our connection to stuff. This year the call for entries is accompanied by a curator’s intervention in the collection, a hunt for thingness in artworks around the university’s campus. Download this map as your guide, or trust your instincts and go alone. Thingness can be broadly interpreted.

What is meant by “critical” and “creative” essays?
A critical text on a work in the collection treats the art as a site of knowledge and research (as opposed to inspiring thoughts distinct from the artwork itself). It relies on close examination of the work to articulate an argument, which could elucidate a formal, iconographic, or contextual analysis of the work itself or the position of the work within the context of the artist’s oeuvre or the New School collection.

In a creative response, the judges will be looking for a lively and compelling poem or short story that engages, explicitly or obliquely, a specific work of art in the New School collection. Authors should think of the tradition of the New York School poets such as Edwin Denby, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, whose work was inspired by art movements.

Here are the winning entries by 2010-2011 award recipients Edwin Rivera, Lenea Grace, and Tikva Hecht based on noir.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Any student currently enrolled in a New School division is eligible.
• Entries should not exceed 2,500 words and must be submitted as an email attachment to vlc@newschool.edu.
• Include a cover page with your name, mailing and email addresses, phone number, university program in which you are enrolled, and your New School Student ID number.
• The artwork that inspired the text must be clearly identified on the entry’s first page by the artist’s name, the work’s title and date, and its location on campus.
• Entries must be received by Tuesday, February 21, 2012.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2010/2011 Art Collection Writing Award. This year’s competition garnered entries from six New School divisions – Drama, GPIA, Lang, Parsons, NSGS, and NSSR – by students from Bachelor, Master and PhD programs with diverse concentrations such as Acting, International Affairs, Governance & Human Right, Fiction & Non-fiction, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, Product Design, Philosophy, Poetry, and Fine Arts.

On Thursday, April 7, the winners will celebrate their accomplishments by reading their winning entries during Noir Now: Student Voices, a night of reading that highlights original texts by New School students. Part of the week-long Noir Festival, the celebration is scheduled to place from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Theresa Lang Community and Student Center on 55 West 13^th Street.

This year, the prizes were awarded to the following students:

First Prize ($400)
Edwin Rivera, New School Writing Program, MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction
For his short story ATONE FOR JOAN’S BONES
Inspired by Adrian Piper, Let’s Talk, 1992
On view in Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Building, 66 West 12^th Street, 4^th floor hallway

Second Prize (tie) ($200)
Lenea Grace, New School Writing Program, MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry
For her poem Pressure Drop
Inspired by Robert Mangold, Frames and Ellipses, 1988
On view at Albert and Vera List Academic Center, 79 Fifth Avenue, 11^th floor hallway

Second Prize (tie) ($200)
Tikva Hecht, New School for Social Research, MA in Philosophy
For her short story Bird’s Eye
Inspired by Whitfield Lovell, Uncle, 1990
On view at Fanton Hall/Welcome Center, 72 Fifth Avenue, 7^th floor hallway
On April 7, the entrants will celebrate their accomplishments during Noir Now: Student Voices

The winners were appointed by a jury composed of:

Althea Hanke-Hills, MFA in Creative Writing, The New School for General Studies
Carin Kuoni, Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Joshua Mack, Vera List Center Advisory Committee
Rosemary O’Neill, Associate Professor of Art History, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons The New School for Design
Robert Polito, Director, Writing Program and MFA in Creative Writing
Silvia Rocciolo, Co-curator, The New School Art Collection
Wendy Walters, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College and The New School for Social Research

The Vera List Center invites applications for 2011-2013 fellowships. Two fellowships will be awarded, each spanning ten months and tied to the Vera List Center’s focus theme for 2011-2013.

The center’s programs evolve around focus themes of particular urgency and broad resonance. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center in 2011-2013 will examine the nature of our material world under the heading of “thingness.”  It will focus on the material conditions of our lives, and call for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between objects and people that may provoke more responsible, ethical and ecologically sound politics. The Vera List Center Fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the center, and through their fellowship projects advance the exploration of the focus theme.

The fellowship is part-time, non-residential, and carries a $10,000 stipend, disbursed monthly. The fellows have access to the libraries of The New School and New York University as well as to a wide range of activities throughout the university. Meetings and informal gatherings with New School faculty and other constituencies are organized throughout the year.

Eligibility

Journalists, historians, visual and performing artists, critics, curators, and cultural practitioners working in any field where they engage art and politics. The New School is an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution and encourages applications from minority candidates as well as from individuals without institutional affiliation.

Application Material

A SASE, application form (download pdf), letter of application, resume, support material (CDs, texts, etc.), names and addresses (email and regular mail) of two references, and a 300-to-500 word fellowship project proposal that is either an element of a larger and ongoing project, or contained within the applicant’s anticipated stay at The New School.

Considerations

• Artistic and/or scholarly excellence of fellowship proposal project.
• Significance of project to the candidate’s long-term practice.
• Does the proposal relate to the focus theme in explicit and creative ways?
• Does the fellowship project reflect or benefit from the proximity to The New School?

Timeline

• April 11, 2011 — Initial application due, followed by reviews by members of the VLC staff, the VLC Advisory Committee, past fellows and New School faculty.
• Mid-April to early May — Finalists are invited to expand on their proposals.
• Late May — Decision and announcement of fellowship appointments.
• Fellowship terms: ten months between fall 2011 and spring 2013.

Past Fellows

Maurice Berger, Wendy T. Ewald, Andrea Geyer, Margarita Gutman, Susan Hapgood, Sharon Hayes, Danny Hoch, Ashley Hunt, Lin + Lam, Kobena Mercer, Lorraine O’Grady, Olu Oguibe, Silvana Paternostro, Wendy Perron, Marjetica Potrc, Leslie Prosterman, Walid Raad, Sarah Rothenberg, Edward Rothstein, Katya Sander, Robert Sember, Elisabeth Sussman, David Thorne, Jonathan Weinberg

Lin + Lam
Since 2001, Lin + Lam have produced interdisciplinary projects that examine the ramifications of the past for the current socio-political moment. Attentive to materiality, site, and the specificities of different medium, their collaboration integrates their individual strengths and backgrounds. Trained in architecture, H. Lan Thao Lam uses photography, sculpture, and installation to address social memories of time, place and politics. Informed by critical cinema, Lana Lin has been interested in translation and the processes of identification. Their work has been exhibited at international venues including the New Museum, The Kitchen, the Queens Museum and LMAK Projects in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Arko Arts Center (Korean Arts Council,) Seoul, Korea, the Arte Nuevo InteractivA’07 Biennial, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Merida, Mexico, and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China.

Lam received her MFA from CalArts and has been Assistant Professor at Middle State Tennessee University and Goddard College, MFA program. Lin received her MFA from Bard College and has been Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and the City College of New York. They have been honored with awards from the US Fulbright Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Princess Grace Foundation, among others.

See their projects: Change Encounters, It Happened Tomorrow: Probabilities, Predictions and Prophecies, and By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School

Robert Sember
Robert Sember is a member of the international sound art collective, Ultra-red, which collaborates with constituencies involved in migrant rights, fair housing and anti-racist struggles, and efforts to combat the AIDS crisis. Recent projects include: SCHOOL OF ECHOES, a multi-year exploration of militant sound investigations initiated during a three month residency at Raven Row, London, in early 2009; SILENT | LISTEN, an investigation of the conditions of the AIDS crisis in the U.S. and Canada presented in partnership with, among others, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; WE COME FROM YOUR FUTURE, an investigation of anti-racism movements in the United Kingdom, presented at Tate Britain, London; and, RE: ASSEMBLY, a long-term project on migration and citizenship commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery, London.

As a researcher in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University from 1998-2006, Robert focused on sexual rights, treatment access, community mobilization, and cultural production in response to the AIDS epidemic. He has taught in the Medical Anthropology Program in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles, the Center for HIV/AIDS Networking at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society at the University of Amsterdam’s Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Recent publications include: Rhine, D.T. and Sember, R. (writing for Ultra-red) (2009) Ten Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation. New York: Printed Matter; Padilla, M., Hirsch, J.S., Munoz-Laboy, M., Sember, R. and Parker, R.G. (eds) (2008) Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. New York: Vanderbilt University Press; Parker, R.G., Petchesky, R. and Sember, R. (eds) (2008) SexPolitics: Reports from the Frontlines. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Sexuality Policy Watch; and, Sember, R. (2009) Sexuality Research in South Africa: The Policy Context. Vasu Reddy and Theo Sandfort, eds. From Social Silence to Social Science: Same-Sex Sexuality, HIV & AIDS and Gender in South Africa. Pretoria: HSRC Press.

See his projects: Vogue’ology, The Cardew Object, and By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School

CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

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This is the final post in a three-part series by Martha Rosler. Read the first post here and the second post here; Vera List Center director Carin Kuoni introduces Rosler’s blogroll project here.

The blogroll

The political blogosphere is, as I have suggested, full of interlocking circles, and I have found myself browsing mostly within a particular ambit, which I think of (following a remark by a Bush-II White House flunky) as the reality-based community. It is decidedly center-left and mostly tipped toward electoral participation rather than exodus. There are many other compelling sites; I just don’t make a regular habit of stopping by. The core of bloggers also post on each other’s sites, or comment on each other’s posts, which often constitutes a valuable give and take (not to mention the sometimes tiresome, sometimes rewarding comments by readers and regulars). For example, this is from a man named Valtin, whose blog is Invictus which, among other things, reports and comments on the U.S.’s use of torture and its growing body of legal defenses:

I have been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005. You can also catch me at Firedoglake, American Torture, The Public Record, Docudharma, the Out of Iraq Bloggers Caucus, and Progressive Historians. I am a psychologist, living in Northern California. A full backlog of my pre-Invictus diaries can be found at my Daily Kos page. E-mail me at sfpsych at gmail dot com.

The blogroll, below, points to some basic sites to visit for political opinion, analysis, comment, and snark. It does not include many of the sites set up as arms of mainstream publications, with the exception of Paul Krugman’s New York Times-hosted site (we are in an economically drastic moment!). There are some sites, such as The American Prospect, those for advocacy groups such as Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for American Progress, American Civil Liberties Union, the CREDO phone company, PFAW, Consumers Union, that are certainly worth reading, but since I receive regular emails from them (listserv phenomenon), I can’t actually list them as sites I regularly visit (but perhaps you should; they provide a wealth of carefully presented material, if without the raw immediacy of the blogs).

Unions maintain websites, often with blogs and commentary, such as Change to Win. The website of the perpetually insurgent, rank-and-file Labor Notes organization is better designed than its magazine. Most magazines and newspapers of note increasingly find it essential to have websites—including the Nation, The Progressive, Le Monde Diplomatique, Harper’s, In These Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Editor & Publisher (breaking news: on Dec. 10, Nielson Co., E&P’s owner, abruptly announced that this 125-year-old magazine – “the bible of the newspaper industry” – and its blogs will be shut down forthwith), Dollars & Sense, and Counterpunch. Znet is a heroic though unbeautiful effort of very long standing at community building and information sharing, and associated with the (even less beautiful) Z magazine. Many of these are trying to nudge readers toward cheaper, web-only subscriptions (especially since some Republicans have persisted in their efforts to stifle dissent by unconscionably boosting third-class postage rates, which affect disproportionately the little magazines that rely more on subscription than on advertising income).

The many video-based websites, mostly not stand-alone sites but offshoots of some prominent blogs (see GRITtv and, say, Glenn Greenwald’s, Kos’s, and TPM’s video links, usually talking-head interviews on topical matters) point to the imminent translation of every important medium of public (as opposed to audience) address to the Internet.

Less well-funded activist and grass-roots groups also maintain news sites, such as Independent Media Center, which collects independent, activist reportage of several countries and languages, of varying quality and interest. (Terminological note: fake grassroots groups on the right, surreptitiously set up by corporations and vicious tycoons, are known as “astroturf.”) Amy Goodman’s superb daily interview radio and community television program Democracy Now! archives every show, offering video, audio, and written transcripts. Finally, individual journalists and writers often have websites that are well worth reading; among others, I like Marie Cocco’s, Barbara Ehrenreich’s, Michael Moore’s, and Helen Thomas’s for periodic visits.

Special mention should be made of some lawyers’ blogs, begun during the Bush II years because of the egregious, persistent, and pernicious flouting of the law by that administration. The premier site is Glenn Greenwald’s, but I have also listed Talk Left, although a number of the other listed blogs are lawyer heavy, and there are other worthy sites, such as John Dean’s FindLaw and, oh, Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Note on the future

Although the Internet is pushing forty, it is under constant reconfiguration. The migration of journalism and of much of the rest of the public sphere, such as it is, to the Internet, has produced a situation in which commerce, technology, and political governance are in play, marshalling the forces of ideology, policing, surveillance, and law; technical and formal innovation; advertising; scams, frauds, and deceptions – and popular pushback. It seems impossible to predict even the next five minutes of Internet life. At present we live in what must look to Internet service providers – commercial giants such as Verizon and AOL – as unreconstructed primitive communism, in which all those who seek to communicate and establish websites are allowed equal access to this virtual “commons,” a situation that its defenders are calling “net neutrality” in their efforts to have this equality of access written into U.S. law.

The grassroots blogosphere is threatened by the efforts of the hosting corporations to scrap net neutrality in favor of the right to charge differential rates to website operators, stratifying the Internet into high-paying corporate providers (and government agencies?) whose sites would load quickly – and all the rest of us, consigned to the slow lane. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, founded in 1990, advocates for electronic policy issues, including the rights of bloggers to remain anonymous, against surveillance and excessive commercialization, for free speech, privacy, digital rights, and of course net neutrality. (Consult them and others on issues of digital rights.) It is net neutrality that has potentiated the healthy set of political blogs and allowed just about anyone to start a new one and hope to find an audience.

Here are some sites that make up part of my regular rounds.

The daily inevitable. The pioneer left activist blog. Left-populist grass-roots central; covering many topics, though unevenly, but the central compass is electoral and congressional politics. Not very good on foreign policy except on our current wars:

Daily Kos — original content, many “diaries,” robust community

Mydd (Direct Democracy) —  spin-off of Daily Kos; see their list of state blogs on the left-hand side of the page

Single author

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com — sharp, often stunning analysis; my homepage

Maha (Barbara O’Brien) — politics & American Buddhism

Echidne of the Snakes — politics through feminist eyes

Informed Comment (Juan Cole) — the go-to source on the Middle East

Tom Tomorrow — cartoons & commentary

I Blame the Patriarchy — a woman in Texas

A further cast of regulars

Hullabaloo — terrific and now often cited by Krugman; one of the first female political bloggers

Firedoglake — sterling; more women

Sadly, No! — snark

Talk Left — another lawyer-based political blog

Progressive Historians

Political magazines, large and small, and aggregators, some with original content

CommonDreams.org

Truthout — aggregator with significant original content

Tom Engelhardt — Engelhardt works at The Nation Institute

Consortium News — investigative journalism; founded by reporter Robert Parry

The Black Commentator — all content is original

Buzzflash — aggregator with attitude, and original comment

The Raw Story — left aggregator

Portside — left aggregator

TPM (Joshua Micah Marshall) — tending more & more toward the beltway mainstream

Truthdig — familiar liberal commentators; led by Robert Scheer, fired after 30-years at the Los Angeles Times

Black Agenda Report — its founders split off from Black Commentator

The Smirking Chimp — named after Bush II

Color of Change — activism on race

Americablog — John Aravosis, one of the early bloggers; site’s political focus encompasses gay activism

Tom Paine — “a project of the Institute for America’s Future”

Duncan Black (“Atrios”) — pioneer

Crooks and Liars — a political site run by a musician; uneven

Journalism & media critique

Media Matters for America — I said above that I wouldn’t list it, but here it is

ProPublica

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

The Daily Howler (Bob Somersby) — uneven, terribly written—unkind metaphors spring to mind—but often heart-stoppingly accurate on press & education reporting

Token science blog, and environmentalism

Pharyngula — a science blog, as advertised

350.org — activism for political action against global warming; founded by writer Bill McKibben

economics, reality-based capitalism

1. mainstream:

Paul Krugman

Brad Delong

Nouriel Roubini

Baseline Scenario (Simon Johnson and others)

2. more to the left:

Economic Policy Institute

Doug Henwood — by publisher of Left Business Observer newsletter

Monthly Review

Middle East

Juan Cole — indispensable analysis

Electronic Intifada — important analysis and commentary

J Street — newly visible Jewish peace camp

New Profile — Israeli activists

oh, well

The Rude Pundit — rude, as advertised

We welcome your comments. Please write to vlc@newschool.edu.

© martha rosler 2009