Crispin Sartwell

1 week ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

As a teenager in the 1970s, at the tail end of the 60s liberation movements, I regarded myself as a revolutionary and capable of violence in the service of social transformation. In particular, I called myself a “militant ecologist” and destroyed some construction equipment that was tearing up the woods near my house to put in some houses. A small cohort of the like-minded and I made threats toward my school (Alice Deal Junior High in DC), demanding an end to compulsory attendance and grading.

2 weeks ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

Lots of people I know are in despair about the amazing conniptions and random thrashing about of Trump 2. It's the end of "the American experiment," they say; it's the apocalypse. The anti-Trumpers have been expressing confusion about whether to fight back as hard as possible (a la Cory Booker, maybe) or just give up and chill, as it’s bewildering and disastrous and all we have to do is let the man and his absurd minions destroy themselves (James Carville).

3 weeks ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

Indoing research for a podcast on the history of American pacifism, I’ve studied Bayard Rustin, the great organizer and expert in non-violent resistance and primary spearhead of Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington. Over the past few years, there’s been a Rustin revival, which is what this inspiring and transformative American life deserves. It's hard to miss the source of that revival: Barack Obama.

1 month ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

The attack on Columbia university by the Trump administration and attendant organizations has quickly become so existential that one must start imagining Manhattan without its Ivy League institution. Even with its $13 billion endowment, it seems that over a quarter of Columbia's year-to-year funding is directly provided by federal grants, and perhaps half is dependent or connected to federal sources.

1 month ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

The origins of music are a mystery. Though music has been universal in human cultures for tens of thousands of years, it doesn’t have an immediately-evident use, or for that matter the sort of obvious evolutionary function that such a ubiquitous adaptation presupposes. Perhaps, anthropologists speculate, it’s used to coordinate collective tasks or help create specific small-group identities.