- From the Editors: Resource and Remedy
Where there is administration there must also exist a system for accountability and responsibility—and this system, in turn, requires administration. When vigilance fails and administrative responsibilities are shirked, all hell will eventually break loose pursuant to principles too familiar to recount.
- Advancing Oligarchy: James Kwak in conversation with The Straddler
Take a simple issue of public policy: given that a company makes a lot of profits, should it share those profits with its workers in the form of higher wages? People would debate questions like this in the 1970s. Today, the Economics 101 position on this is "no, they shouldn't." And that has not only become the dominant ideology, but it has become an ideology that poses as mathematical truth
- Frinky: Fiction by Eddie Lombardi
Out above water, about one nine zero smoot, or thereabouts, stopping. There then eastward facing, straightahead looking, small distant dots atop downtown buildings red blinking, frinky face blank, body motionless, moments passing, now leaning forward against iron handrail, down looking down, at river, charles, slowly rolling.
- Encountering Bernard Lonergan Alongside Richard Liddy
My guess is that working in a system that just doesn't foster questioning—sooner or later it's got to be deadening to the soul. Sooner or later, chickens do come to home to roost. Maybe they come home to roost in stages.
- Where the Boardwalk Ends:
Photographs by Mark Ostow, Essay by Elizabeth Murphy
In height, Revel is 710 feet of steel and glass. Altogether, the completed tower's windowed area dwarfs that of the Hooters franchise by approximately 1,775 times. Viewed as a hindrance to the comings and goings of coastal birds, Revel is remarkable. But more significantly, examined as a hindrance to the surrounding community—it is phenomenal. Revel is a colossus, a lodestone. Looking carefully up at the windows that have been replaced by boards, one sees a building being destroyed by its own emptiness. And the emptiness spreads in the forms of neglected lots and abandoned homes. "Rhymes with Devil," observed one fed-up resident.
- Poetry by David Scronce, Rodney Nelson, and Nathan Gunsch
- Yojimbo and Administration by Dan Monaco
In Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo there is a liberating vision of administration as a vital task requiring constant vigilance, competence, ethical discipline, and an ability to act in a way that simultaneously revolutionizes and participates in the system governing the status quo—especially when the status quo is aligned squarely (or merely obliquely) against human dignity.
- Love Letter to Rane Arroyo by Elizabeth Murphy
"Why haven't I / written more love letters?" When remembering Rane Arroyo, this the last line of his poem "A Fake Owl," will probably always come to mind. The line sneaks up on you—after a poem's worth about airports, Toledo, and a fake owl—and does what I believe it was meant to do; it asks a question of us, sincerely. On first reading, my immediate thought was, "Yes! Why haven't I?!"
- The Straddler Review:
Barack Obama and the Culture of Consultancy
in collaboration with James Comerford
Upon his inauguration, Barack Obama ensconced himself in the Oval Office as a newer sort of hero, one who had been floating about on the American scene for years, but had not had his iconic moment until the presidential election of 2008. On January 20th, 2009, Barack Obama took control of the executive branch as America's first consultant president.