Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

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  • Occupying Memory

    My coverage of Occupy Wall Street continues, and evolves. The movement that started at Liberty Plaza is growing all the time, and as it does, I’ve been spending less and less time at the occupations themselves and more and more time writing about them, trying to take account of what has so far been the…

  • Killing Celebrity Buddhas

    Occupy Wall Street’s Liberty Plaza has become pretty much the place for self-styled progressive celebrities and politicians to appear. On the one hand, these visits are greatly appreciated by the occupiers and have helped strengthen the movement. However, they also raise tricky questions for a movement determined to be non-hierarchical and egalitarian. In a roundtable on the occupation…

  • Ten Years of War, Three Weeks of Occupation

    Today—or yesterday, depending on how you count it—marks a decade since the ongoing war on Afghanistan began. Tomorrow marks the end of the third week since the occupation of Liberty Plaza near Wall Street began. The first might be an utterly solemn occasion were it not for the second. And were it not, also, for…

  • #AmericanAutumn

    Over at Waging Nonviolence, I’ve been doing a bunch of coverage of some of the big protest actions being planned this fall, efforts to turn people’s attention away from the nonsense straw polls and candidate posturing and onto masses of people in the streets. I’ve been going to planning meetings for both those intending to…

  • Stop Bombing Them

    Sometimes, when one belongs to the richest and most militarily over-equipped country in the world, there’s a bit of a temptation to overthink things. I was reminded of this at the end of my interview—just published at The Immanent Frame—with the great Pakistani anthropologist Saba Mahmood. I asked the tangled question of what American women…

  • The Rich Are Organized—Why Aren’t You?

    At a time when, in the United States, majority opinions—like the need for tax increases, military-spending cuts, clean energy, and campaign finance reform—don’t seem to even be on the table in Washington, when whole neighborhoods and cities seem to have fallen off the political map, one might find oneself wondering: Where did our democracy go? Today at…

  • The Suspicious Revolution

    What does it do to people, and to a society, to suddenly become revolutionary? I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent…

  • An Eden Full of Dudes

    The end is the beginning is the end (that’s a Smashing Pumpkins line), and all are in Eden. Today at Religion Dispatches, Brook Wilensky-Lanford and I talk about her brand new book, Paradise Lust, out this week. It tells the stories of some bold explorers from the past few centuries who have tried to figure…

  • You Have Searched Me and Known Me

    Over at The Daily—my latest commentary on consumer technology gets theological: Apple CEO Steve Jobs returned to the stage earlier this month to announce a long-awaited new product: iCloud. “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,” he said. “We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital…

  • What’s at Stake in The Tree of Life?

    If you’re into getting worked up about semi-artsy movies, the one you’re supposed to get worked up about lately is Terrence Malick’s new The Tree of Life. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. And got booed. You’re especially supposed to get worked up, it seems, if you’re into religion. At Killing the…