Zelda was a fierce and gentle creature. Like her namesake, she was saddled with an insufferable writer as a partner and cursed to live a short life. Her beginnings were not easy: a street cat on Oakland’s Telegraph Ave, she was, by the time I got her at the age…

By: Jas Johl On June 18, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared the nation’s so-called “war on drugs”. …

By Jas Johl Astronomy has long been a tool for mapping changes in human history. Four hundred years ago, a celestial event called “The Great Conjunction” marked the beginning of paradigm shifting changes in scientific and philosophical thought.

The following piece was initially composed for a 2006 course within the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley, titled: “War, Violence, & Terrorism.” — The phenomena of identity politics has led to a sharp departure from the ideal that human rights are universal, not particular. That is…

"What is ideology if not simply the familiar, well known, transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself), the mirror it looks into for self-recognition, precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself?" …

Originally published as part of the 2011 University of Oxford’s Failed Novelists Society Anthology. When I was young, I was terrified by my pores. I asked my mother once what the tiny little holes I saw near my newly emerging arm and leg hair were. They looked alien to me…

The Human Factor Information Security is often addressed via it’s technical components: a new net patch, encryption service, or private network to keep us safe. And yet, experts in information security consistently cite the human factor as the biggest vulnerability to any organization. …

The following piece was initially composed for a 2007 course on Political Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Overview Neo-liberalism is a constructed narrative, theory and interpretative mode employed to account for and make sense of people and events in political history. As a tradition of political thought, it purports…

The following piece was initially composed for a 2006 course within the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” begins by calling into question the notion of art, linking the construction of its meaning and value…