Division of Arts and Humanities

Some still like it hot

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Some still like it hot Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/01/2026 - 07:00

Cody DeBos

On what would have been her 100th birthday, Marilyn Monroe still defies the image society gave her, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder film historian Clark Farmer

Platinum blond hair framing red lips parted just so. A white skirt flapping over the grate of a subway. Her image, the portrait of 1950s Americana, is instantly recognizable.

Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, died at age 36. Today, a century after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most iconic stars in American cultural history.

But how well do we actually know her? More importantly, what does it mean that we know the image so much better than the woman beneath?

Clark Farmer, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder assistant teaching professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts, encourages students to look closer at film and the cultural machinery responsible for our favorite on-screen stories.

Clark Farmer, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at the �鶹��Ѱ��, has spent his career teaching students to look closer at film and the cultural machinery responsible for our favorite on-screen stories.

On what would be Monroe’s 100th birthday, Farmer offers a nuanced perspective of her mythos.

A star is built

The Monroe the world knows was as much discovered as she was constructed. When Norma Jeane entered the film business in 1946, the Hollywood studio system was already adept at creating personalities for its stars.

“Studios had a vast machinery to manufacture personas for their actors, but the performers were able to contribute to the process,” Farmer says.

That was something Monroe took seriously. She collaborated with her personal makeup artist, Allan “Whitey” Snyder, to develop the signature look she debuted in Niagara.

“This is the look that people who have never seen a Monroe film still recognize. The look immortalized in Andy Warhol’s silkscreens,” Farmer says.

Of course, studios also controlled which roles stars were cast in, giving them an outsized say in how they were seen. From the start, Monroe was handed “dumb blonde” parts and spent years fighting to be seen as something more.

More than glamour

Hollywood had no shortage of glamorous women before Monroe arrived on set and has had no shortage since. Rita Hayworth set hearts alight and Betty Grable smiled her way onto wartime pinups.

However, when Monroe broke through in 1953, starring in Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, the cultural shock was palpable. That same December, the first issue of Playboy hit newsstands with Monroe starring in its centerfold.

“She wasn’t simply glamorous or alluring,” Farmer says. “She was sexuality personified.”

Unlike earlier Hollywood sirens who projected power and control, Monroe came across unguarded, almost innocent.

“Monroe seemed softer and more vulnerable, even to some extent damaged. Men might project on to her fantasies of an unthreatening partner who didn’t demand anything from them,” Farmer says of the way Monroe’s sexuality was coded.

That image only deepened her allure. After her untimely death, the idea of Monroe as a beautiful victim became a permanent part of her star persona.

During the 1950s, though, her status as the “ultimate sex symbol” was cemented in the zeitgeist. It was widely accepted during a time when cultural gender roles were incredibly narrow.

A year after her death in 1962, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique would help launch second-wave feminism. This was the start of an evolution in how society viewed Monroe and helped pave the way for wider appreciation of the actress, not just the image.

“I think that the true legacy of Monroe is in her performances, where you can see her as a great talent that transcends just being an image,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder film historian Clark Farmer. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“I think it is a better world where a woman isn’t reduced to being just sex and nothing else, and we can instead see their sexuality as part of their complete humanity,” Farmer says.

The actress behind the archetype

While studios and many fans were content to enjoy the eye candy, Farmer is quick to point out the seriousness with which Monroe approached her craft. From 1947, she trained in Method acting, first at the Actors' Laboratory Theater and later at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York.

Her 1956 film Bus Stop, filmed under a new contract that gave her more creative control, was a turning point. Monroe took on an Ozark accent and stripped away her signature glamour to deliver a performance that garnered a positive critical reception for her acting chops rather than her looks.

However, Farmer says dramatic work wasn’t where Monroe’s talent was greatest. He suggests comedy was where her star shined brightest.

“Critics and audiences often underestimate how much skill goes into comic acting,” Farmer says. “In part because ‘serious’ acting is associated with dramatic roles. But playing a ‘dumb blonde’ who secretly isn’t so dumb is actually very challenging.”

In films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, Farmer sees an actress using irony, comedic timing and quiet intelligence to subvert the stereotypes she’s performing.

“Today I think we recognize the immense skill in her comic roles,” he says.

A lasting image

More than six decades after her death, Monroe’s image has grown only more vivid. That is no accident.

“James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are encased in the amber of film at the moment of their peak popularity. We don’t have to let a pesky thing like aging get in the way of fantasizing about them,” Farmer says. “Monroe will never be older than 36.”

Earlier Hollywood sex symbols didn’t fare as well. Many saw their stars rise and fall with their eras. Others found themselves embroiled in controversy, forever tarnishing once glamourous personas.

Monroe’s untimely death froze her popularity at its height, and her image would go on to inspire everyone from Madonna to a generation of filmmakers who never met her.

Still, most people, including the students in Farmer’s classes, know Monroe’s image from a distance, but have never actually watched her work.

“They are often surprised by her singing ability, her comic timing, and her obvious intelligence,” Farmer says.

On Monroe’s 100th, perhaps the most fitting tribute is to not just admire the icon, but to watch her films with greater appreciation for the woman smiling behind the cherry lipstick.

“I think that the true legacy of Monroe is in her performances,” Farmer says, “where you can see her as a great talent that transcends just being an image.”

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On what would have been her 100th birthday, Marilyn Monroe still defies the image society gave her, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder film historian Clark Farmer.

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‘Every novel is an experience’

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:30:51 +0000

‘Every novel is an experience’ Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/22/2026 - 06:30

Clay Bonnyman Evans

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels

Helmut Müller-Sievers has an idea to help reignite students’ interest in taking literature courses: Rather than teaching novels as a source of knowledge, academics should encourage young readers to pay attention to the experience of reading.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says Müller-Sievers, professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature at the �鶹��Ѱ��.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers.

In his new book The Novel Experience (Cornell University Press, 2026), Müller-Sievers follows the lead of three thinkers with “radical” notions about experience—the third-century Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna;19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James; and19th-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche—and draws on his own experiences of reading.

“Fewer and fewer people are taking literature courses. We foolishly try to counter this loss by emphasizing what kind of knowledge students get from reading,” he says. “Because we are so focused on knowledge, we eliminate and, in a sense, prohibit the expression of the experience of reading novels.”

What was it like to read the book?

Rather than presenting a novel as something to be interpreted and or critically examined, the idea is to encourage readers to observe and communicate what it was actually like to read the book: Why did they choose the book? How difficult was it? How long did it take? Under what conditions—place, time, surroundings—did they read the book? Were they drawn to or distanced from the different characters? Did they enjoy it? Did anything stick with them when finished? How did the protagonist’s experience relate to their own?

In emphasizing knowledge to the exclusion of experience, the Western academy has promoted “an atrophied, mutilated sense of what experience is,” Müller-Sievers says. “We think there is a self . . . that is predicated on a division between the experiencer and what is experienced. James, Nāgārjuna and Nietzsche are radical critics of that idea.”

“The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers.

Where Western thought from time immemorial has argued that there exist stable, individual human “selves” that go through life almost as if watching a movie, distinct from their own experiences, Buddhist thought argues that separation between consciousness and experience is a delusion.

Müller-Sievers doesn’t dispute that there is knowledge to be found in literature or that it requires knowledge to understand and teach it in certain ways. But focusing almost exclusively on knowledge ignores the primary motivations most people who read novels: experience and entertainment.

“When people who are not academics read a book, they are not primarily interested in knowledge, but rather in partaking of an experience,” he says. “The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human.”

Müller-Sievers sees no contradiction in reading for both knowledge and experience and argues that sharing the experiences of reading with others increases interest and enjoyment.

“So, rather than say, ‘Hey, let’s learn about Thomas Mann,’ it’s ‘Hey, let’s talk about the experience of reading about an experience. We can find common language that makes it exciting,” he says.

Müller-Sievers also sees reading for experience as a “civic virtue.” Humans can never have the experiences of another in the real world, but they can by reading novels. Reading novels can help students become more aware of their singular distinctness from others and their experiences.

And at a time when artificial-intelligence continues to insinuate its way into nearly every aspect of modern life, he detects a clear, inviolable distinction between human and machine intelligence.

“Only humans can have experiences. AI can only imitate experiences by looking back. It always looks back; it has to look back,” he says. “There is no way to distinguish between human and AI knowledge. But we can distinguish between deep human experience and the retroactive intelligence of AI.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels.

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Top photo: Bhautik Patel/Unsplash

Is it temple robbery? That depends on who is doing the taking

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:15:43 +0000

Is it temple robbery? That depends on who is doing the taking Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/18/2026 - 13:15

Bradley Worrell

New book from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Isabel Köster examines temple robbery and the ancient Roman politics of moral blame

Ancient Romans often plundered temples in their wars of conquest—sometimes openly and with astonishing scale. Large statues and famous works of art were carried away from foreign lands to Rome, treasuries were emptied and sacred spaces were stripped bare.

Yet, despite how frequently these robberies occurred, Romans still expressed sharp moral outrage about it—not for the plundering itself, but for particular individuals accused of committing it for the “wrong” reasons.

That contradiction lies at the heart of Stealing from the Gods, the new book by Isabel Köster, a �鶹��Ѱ�� associate professor of classics whose research focus is the history, religion and literature of the Roman Republic and the early Empire. Her book, which has its origins in her PhD dissertation, examines how Roman authors thought about sacred theft, imperial power and moral character.

Isabel Köster, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder associate professor of classics, notes that calling someone a temple robber became the ultimate character assassination in ancient Rome.

In a recent interview with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Köster discussed who was doing the robbing, explaining why temples were such tempting targets and why calling someone a temple robber became the ultimate character assassination in ancient Rome. Her comments have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space.

Question: How common was temple robbery? Also, who was doing the taking and where was it happening?

Köster: In military contexts, it seems to have been fairly common. However, it was usually not labeled ‘temple robbery’ unless a Roman author wanted to emphasize a character flaw. For everyday thefts—small amounts of money or objects disappearing from sanctuaries—we know very little; our sources simply aren’t interested in that kind of activity.

These weren’t small, anonymous thieves. They were generals, governors and emperors.

Most cases took place in conquered or soon‑to‑be‑conquered territories, especially in Greece and Asia Minor. The few instances we have in Rome itself are associated with periods of civil war.

Question: Why plunder temples?

Köster: In many ancient communities, sanctuaries were essentially the equivalent of banks today. They were often the most heavily fortified places in a town, with solid walls and impressive doors. They were used to store valuables that belonged to the community, such as treasuries, and also private valuables that individuals entrusted to the gods. If you didn’t want to keep something at home, one option was to bring it to a sanctuary and ask the deity to look after it.

So, if you’re conquering territory and need money quickly, temples are a very natural place to go. Especially during long, expensive campaigns far from Rome, some temple plundering was probably inevitable. That’s simply a reality of the economics of ancient warfare.

What’s interesting is how Roman sources frame this. They ask, first of all, who is doing the plundering? If it’s a general with an impeccable reputation who claims to be acting for the good of Rome—funding further war and later returning treasures for public display—then that’s considered acceptable. Nobody criticizes those cases.

But if the person involved already has a reputation for greed or moral failings and is clearly enriching himself, then the same behavior is treated as temple robbery. This distinction allows Roman authors to frame standard warfare practices as fine while isolating blame onto particular individuals.

Question: What kinds of objects were typically taken from temples?

Köster: Generally, the more spectacular, the better. We’re talking about giant statues, large amounts of coinage and especially famous works of art. In some extreme cases, particularly greedy individuals went much further—breaking decorations off doors or removing parts of statues they couldn’t transport. But in general, Roman armies had the logistics to move large items and they took advantage of that.

Despite how frequently temple robberies occurred, ancient Romans still expressed sharp moral outrage about it—not for the plundering itself, but for particular individuals accused of committing it for the “wrong” reasons.

Question: What happened to the plunder once it was taken?

Köster: Some of it was melted down on the spot to generate revenue and pay soldiers. Other objects—especially famous artworks—were selected to be transported back to Rome for triumphs and public display. How those decisions were made and how much was lost is something we simply don’t know.

Question: Was temple plundering technically illegal under Roman law?

Köster: Often, no. Roman law was quite clear on this point: If a sanctuary was not located in Roman territory and its possessions had not been formally consecrated by the Roman people, then legally speaking, taking from it was not considered a temple robbery. A sanctuary in a territory that Rome was about to conquer didn’t necessarily count as a properly sacred space from a Roman legal perspective.

That’s one of the reasons the moral outrage in the literary sources is so interesting. There’s a real disconnect between what was legally permissible and what ancient authors chose to condemn.

Question: If plundering from temples in foreign lands was typically legal, what qualified as temple robbery in Roman eyes?

Köster: That’s the key question, and the answer is: Who did the taking? When Roman authors decide whether something counts as temple robbery, they don’t usually start by asking what was taken or where. They ask who was responsible?

If the person plundering was seen as morally upright and claimed to be acting for the benefit of Rome—funding campaigns, returning treasures for public display—then the act was framed as acceptable.

But if the person already had a questionable reputation, then the exact same behavior became reprehensible. Calling someone a temple robber is character assassination. It’s a way of saying this person is greedy, impious and unfit for power.

Question: How does that distinction help Romans think about their empire more broadly?

Köster: It’s a very clever rhetorical move. Roman imperial conquests inevitably involved violence and the destruction of sacred spaces, but Roman authors didn’t want to portray the entire system as flawed. By framing temple robbery as the failure of a few bad individuals, they could acknowledge harm without accepting collective responsibility.

Thus, it’s not a problem with Roman warfare, according to this logic. It’s a problem with isolated people who can’t behave themselves.

Question: The Roman statesman, philosopher and lawyer Cicero plays a big role in your book. Why are his speeches about temple robbery so important?

Köster: You can’t study temple robbery without Cicero’s speeches against Verres, the former governor of Sicily. Temple robbery is not part of the formal charges against Verres, which focus on corruption, but Cicero devotes enormous attention to attacks on temples because he felt they strengthened his argument.

Cicero clearly felt that these stories helped his case. The logic is: If someone is capable of violating sacred spaces so badly, then of course he’s capable of embezzlement and corruption. Verres becomes the benchmark against which all other temple robbers are measured.

Question: You state in your book that temple robbers become almost caricatures in Roman literature. What do those caricatures look like?

Köster: They’re remarkably consistent. A temple robber is never just someone who steals from temples. They are also accused of murder, torture, illegal enslavement and all kinds of brutality.

"In Rome, accusations of temple robbery were less about protecting the gods and more about defining who belonged and who didn’t."

But what’s really interesting is how often these figures fail at basic ‘Roman-ness.’ They can’t give a good speech. They don’t know how to host a dinner party properly. They dress inappropriately and don’t know how to behave in elite social settings. Despite reaching the top of society, they’re portrayed as outsiders to Roman culture.

Question: Based on available historical records, how many Romans were convicted of temple robbery? Also, what punishments did they face?

Köster: We have no robust evidence for prosecutions for temple robbery—sacrilegium in Latin—during the period I study, nor do we have definitions of the crime or discussions of penalties. In later Christian sources, where sacrilegium signifies a broad range of crimes that diminish the sacred status of someone or something (e.g., blasphemy or insulting the emperor), it is a capital offense. Here it merits the most horrific penalties that the Roman world has to offer, such as throwing people to wild animals for public entertainment. But in pre-Christian Rome, at least in the sources that survive, accusations of temple robbery are not a legal charge, but supporting evidence in other cases.

Question: What roles do the gods themselves play in these Roman narratives? Do they ever punish temple robbers?

Köster: Sometimes. There are dramatic stories of divine punishment: People struck dead, afflicted with disease—even losing their hands while trying to plunder a sanctuary. But those stories are surprisingly rare.

Most of the time, temple robbers get away with it. That raised big questions for me about ancient ideas of divine justice and the reliability of gods as protectors of their own property, which will be the focus of my next major project.

Question: If readers could take one or two ideas away from your book, what would they be?

Köster: That when we encounter moral outrage in ancient sources, we should ask what that work is doing. In Rome, accusations of temple robbery were less about protecting the gods and more about defining who belonged and who didn’t. The first question to ask isn’t ‘what happened?’ It’s ‘who is being accused?’

At its heart, this is a book about insults. And insults tell us what a culture values.

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New book from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Isabel Köster examines temple robbery and the ancient Roman politics of moral blame.

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Top image: "The Triumph of Aemilius Paulus" by Carle Vernet, 1789

Happiness in literature isn’t entirely a matter of chance

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:19:24 +0000

Happiness in literature isn’t entirely a matter of chance Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/15/2026 - 12:19

Alexandra Phelps

Which is why readers and storytellers continue turning to Jane Austen, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Nicole Mansfield Wright, considering why this enduring proto-feminist writer still holds a place in the classroom

Last week, The Other Bennet Sister debuted on BritBox, allowing U.S. viewers to enjoy the latest reworking of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice—this time telling the story of the often-overlooked Bennet sister Mary.

The series, based on the novel by Janice Hadlow, first debuted in the United Kingdom on the BBC and arrives in what would have been Jane Austen’s 250th birthday year (her birthday was Dec. 16). Known for her ability to capture the beauty of the ordinary lives of everyday people, Austen wrote novels that remain relevant centuries later. In the opening lines of Mansfield Park she declares, "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery," revealing that as a writer, she strived to depict joy and community within the lives she created in her novels.

Yet even in developing happy and uplifting plotlines, Austen didn’t refrain from commenting on the social pressures and shortcomings of her society. Two and a half centuries later, the strength of this proto-feminist icon still remains in classrooms as students discover through Austen how gender, choice, relationships and power interact with one another.

Year after year, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Nicole Mansfield Wright, students are surprised by Jane Austen, connecting to her writing in ways they didn’t think they could.

Nicole Mansfield Wright, an associate professor of English at the �鶹��Ѱ��, has seen Austen’s power firsthand. As a scholar of late 18th- and early 19th-century British literature, she notices that students often presume Austen’s writing will be prim, proper and unrelatable to their own lives. Year after year, though, students are surprised by Austen, she says, connecting to her writing in ways they didn’t think they could.

On a broader level, Austen resonates with people even though our political structures are different from hers, says Wright, who received international coverage for an op-ed she wrote on Austen's political relevance today, “Alt-Right Jane Austen.” On a personal level, Wright explains that Austen “resonates because she’s both relatable and profound. She speaks to situations we recognize, like having a sister whom you’re really close with or not being able to suss out what a crush thinks about you. These are really relatable situations, but she takes them seriously. She’s not just sensationalizing it.”

When teaching Austen, Wright encourages students to look through various lenses at the elements that make her novels so complex. Although Austen published just four novels while she was alive—two more were published posthumously—her limited body of work still captures the dynamics that exist within a wide range of social classes and experiences. These experiences are what allow students to connect to her work. “She’s into exploring our everyday experiences and helping us think through: ‘What kind of person do I want to be in the world?’” Wright remarks.

In Wright’s course “Developments in the Novel,” she includes Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In one scene, Elinor Dashwood, the eldest Dashwood sister, has a conversation with Colonel Brandon, a suitor of Elinor’s sister Marianne. Brandon mentions the sadness and loss when young people sacrifice their own ideas and originality for conformity, observing, “One is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.” Wright uses moments like this to help students understand the importance of advocating for their own ideas.

Recalling a phrase from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which she encountered when she was a college student herself, Wright says, “One thing I really find important to my pedagogical strategy is that I don't think about education as ‘banking knowledge.’ I’m not dispensing information and then students store it in a bank and don’t question it. It’s about giving students a toolkit to decide how they’re going to operate out in the world. To be informed so that when they come across these ideas especially in this world of misinformation, they can be knowledgeable and they can come to the table with their own ideas.”

Publishing anonymously

Although today Austen’s novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey—are widely read, she didn’t publish under her name during her lifetime. Wright explains that female authors were often viewed as scandalous. “If you published a novel as a female author, you had to seemingly disavow your authorship. During her lifetime, Jane Austen’s name was not emblazoned on the covers of her books; one novel was attributed to ‘A Lady,’ for example.” During Austen’s life, the literary canon was overwhelmingly male, and women who wrote instead of keeping to the domestic sphere were often seen as morally suspect.

Austen’s legacy exists partially because of the way she centers and distributes power to female protagonists, says Nicole Mansfield Wright. (Photo: actress Ella Bruccoleri as Mary Bennet in The Other Bennet Sister. BBC/Bad Wolf)

Today, that canon has expanded to include a broader range of writers and stories, and there are ongoing discussions about what works deserve recognition. “There’s this idea of scarcity; that there’s only a set amount of attention. If we give this attention to new authors, is it taking away from honoring the authors who have stood the test of time?” Wright asks. “I would retort something along the lines of ‘Why do we have to choose?’” Literature, she argues, continues to offer new ideas and important insights, especially for students who are learning how to engage with the world around them.

Despite Austen’s limited catalogue, Wright resists naming just one novel as important to read. Instead, she approaches them “in an apothecary way. There are different Austens I can prescribe based on what malady you have.” For students and those reading for pleasure, there are different novels that can speak to universal feelings, she says. “If you’re worried about not getting started in life right and it seems like everyone is moving ahead of you, [pick up] Persuasion. If you’re an awkward person and you feel like you’re an outlier from others and that you’re not valued, [read] Mansfield Park. If you just want a good laugh, [choose] Pride and Prejudice. There are definite advantages to choosing each; it’s hard to choose just one.”

Austen’s legacy exists partially because of the way she centers and distributes power to female protagonists, Wright says, adding that Austen’s novels importantly “sustain a dialectic—a debate—rather than settling it,” and allow characters to exist beyond categories such as good or bad. Wright explains that more broadly, “novels remind us that our individual choices cumulatively can operate for or against justice. They make us feel less helpless. I have had situations where I think back to what this character would do in this situation.”

For students and readers navigating their own uncertainties and decisions, Austen’s novels offer an enduring possibility—a way to see themselves in characters who, despite being written centuries ago, were also questioning their belonging, identity, and power.

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Top photo: A scene of the five Bennet sisters from The Other Bennet Sister (Photo: BBC/Bad Wolf)

Telling stories of The Garden

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:12:42 +0000

Telling stories of The Garden Rachel Sauer Wed, 05/13/2026 - 16:12

Rachel Sauer

In recently published book The Garden, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder poet Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief

Paradise is only ever a thought.

Julie Carr pauses for a moment, remembering what led her to The Garden. It was 2021, and there had been several shootings at or near Denver’s East High School—one in the building, one in front of it and one half a block away. Carr’s daughter was a student there at the time.

Carr had written about shootings before, attempting through poetry to understand the incomprehensible, but that wasn’t the topic she wanted to focus on this time.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief in her book The Garden.

“Of course it was terrifying and tragic and awful, but I was feeling, as many people are feeling right now, this kind of block against what to do,” explains Carr, professor of English and creative writing and chair of women and gender studies at the �鶹��Ѱ��. “We protested, we’d written laws . . . but everything felt like a dead end.

“In that moment, I had a friend say, ‘You’re not just having a political problem here, you’re having a spiritual crisis.’ It’s this question of what do we do with violence? What do we do with our feelings of paralysis?”

Those questions led her down wandering paths of mystical tradition, of memories of her uncle, of dreams of fire in the dry Colorado grass, of imaginings like fragments of broken glass. And she arrived at The Garden, her recently published book that weaves fractured narratives into reoriented themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

In the end, as at the beginning, I just wanted to think about the woman smoking on the planter’s edge.

If she can point to a beginning, it was when she began reading the writing of 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. What she found in her reading was unsettling, “in this way in which the questions that we have are the questions humans have always had—questions with no answers, questions about the origins of evil, questions about what it means to be part of a community. But it was helpful to write in conversation with this central medieval thinker.”

On a parallel path to these questions with no answers was Carr’s longtime passion for theoretical physics, which grew during her undergraduate education studying with the philosopher and feminist physicist Karen River Barad. Carr began seeing similarities between the world of thought embedded in quantum field theory and the worlds of thought embedded in Jewish mysticism—“this sense that the world is not as it seems, that there are multiple ways of knowing,” she says.

“I’m interested in different ways of writing: a narrative mode, a more philosophical mode and a more lyrical mode, and how these different approaches can circle around some of the same concerns, the same histories, the same unanswerable questions,” says Julie Carr. (Back cover of The Garden showing artwork by Tony Robbin)

She thought of her uncle, the artist Tony Robbin, who was fascinated with the ideas of four-dimensional space and geometry, which is and isn’t a real thing, Carr explains. The fourth dimension is a mathematical concept that can be played out in the world of math and the world of computer-generated imagery, “even though when we look at the world there’s no fourth spatial dimension that we can see,” she says.

Since the early 19th century, mathematicians and philosophers have theorized about the fourth dimension, ideas that held equal fascination for Cubists like Picasso and other European modernist artists.

“They were interested in the idea of fourth-dimensional space for the same reason I became interested in Maimonides or River Barad was interested in quantum field theory: When you accept quantum theory or 4-D, you begin to understand that empirical reality is only one version of this universe.

“These modernist poets and painters who were interested in the fourth dimension, it gave them a sense of the possible. If you’re looking at (Guillaume) Apollinaire coming out of World War I, writing about `the beyond of this earth’ (in the poem ‘War’), or at Tony (Robbin) trying to describe fourth-dimensional geometry to me over and over when I was a child, you can sense the dynamism, which is so alive in his paintings. They just evoke an endlessness of possibility.”

Once, twice, dozens of times throughout my late-cold-war childhood, my uncle, the painter of the fourth dimension, had stood before me in the fluorescent light of his studio speaking of the universal failure to perceive things as they really were.

It quickly became clear as Carr wrote into these themes that she was writing in multiple different ways—memories of bombs falling that weren’t hers but felt like they were. Holocaust histories pressed against the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pressed against the Gaza war. Strange images, such as a finger tracing the edge of an oxygen tent, a scholar wearing a stained red sweater, her friend the arborist asking her, as they walk toward “a tree blooming bedspread pink,” whether she ever hears ghost stories. Not all of these images could appear in one book.

“It became the idea of writing a trilogy,” Carr says, explaining how The Garden is the first of three, the second of which, Turning, will be released next year. “I’m interested in different ways of writing: a narrative mode, a more philosophical mode and a more lyrical mode, and how these different approaches can circle around some of the same concerns, the same histories, the same unanswerable questions.”

But it seemed to me then and seems to me now that the best books are the ones that are never done. Even if bound and published, even if lauded and canonized, the greatest books carry a sense of incompletion. More: a sense of having been abandoned.

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In recently published book The Garden, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder poet Julie Carr explores themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

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Top image: "Lobofour" by Tony Robbin, 1982

Winning films commemorate �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder at 150

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:05:12 +0000

Winning films commemorate �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder at 150 Rachel Sauer Thu, 05/07/2026 - 17:05

Student filmmakers participating in the 150 Years of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder film competition had five minutes or fewer to tell a story from the university's expansive history

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the �鶹��Ѱ��--a milestone that is inspiring both reflections on those first 150 years and visions of what the next 150 might bring.

To commemorate and celebrate �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder's first 150 years, the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts issued a challenge to students: Create a film that's three to five minutes long, incorporates archival material from University Colorado Publicity Collections and/or photographs from the �鶹��Ѱ��Campus Building Collections and tells a story from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder's first 150 years.

The winning films by Doug Conway and Benjamin Albuisson incorporate both historical photos and videos, telling stories of a spot in Boulder, Colorado, where communities grew, where ideas flourished and where innovation with potential to change the world happened.

Winning film by Doug Conway

Winning film by Benjamin Albuisson

Honorable mention film

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Student filmmakers participating in the 150 Years of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder film competition had five minutes or fewer to tell a story from the university's expansive history.

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As a new space race takes shape, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder class asks: Do we understand China?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:16:14 +0000

As a new space race takes shape, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder class asks: Do we understand China? Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/29/2026 - 11:16

'China's Space Dream,' ASIA 4100, brings aerospace engineers, Chinese language students and international affairs majors into one room—and a visiting journalist from the South China Morning Post into the conversation

Days after Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific, returning four astronauts from the first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century, a science journalist who has spent years reporting on China's space program from inside its scientific institutions sat down with a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder classroom full of students who had been tracking the same story from the outside.

The conversation that followed put the American triumph in a wider frame. When the International Space Station was being designed in the 1990s, China had little to offer a partnership even if one had been on the table. Three decades later, the country operates its own permanently crewed space station, has returned the first-ever samples from the far side of the Moon, and is on track to bring back the first Martian soil before the United States does. The students, aerospace engineering majors sitting next to Chinese language and civilizations majors, history students alongside international affairs specialists, already knew these facts. What they wanted from Ling Xin was something harder to find out, what does this moment look like from the other side of the space race?

ASIA 4100, “China’s Space Dream: Long March to the Moon and Beyond,” is a course developed through the support of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s interdisciplinary Space Minor and taught by Lauren Collins, a teaching assistant professor and director of the Asian Studies program in the Center for Asian Studies. Now in its second iteration, the class will be offered again in spring 2027.

Collins designed the course around an observation that kept surfacing in her own work. US-China space competition is one of the defining dynamics of a shifting world order, but the people who understand the engineering often lack the cultural and historical context, and the people who study China often aren’t following the technical developments.

Four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft atop the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket launch on the agency’s Artemis II test flight, Wednesday, April 1, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Photo: NASA)

“The mix in the classroom is the whole point,” Collins said. “Aerospace and astronomy students know something about orbital mechanics and mission design. Chinese language and civilizations students know something about political culture and history. International affairs students understand geopolitics. But the interconnectedness across all of those domains is what surprises everyone, including me.”

The course weaves together Chinese culture, history, geopolitical contexts, and the race to the Moon as it unfolds in real time. Students study the origins of China’s space program, the role of the “space dream” in Chinese national identity, the Wolf Amendment that bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with China, the military dimensions of space technology, and the case for collaboration.

“Warfare and military applications are clearly an issue,” Collins said. “But the need to collaborate is so key, too. We’re talking about planetary challenges that affect all of us like climate monitoring, asteroid deflection, space debris, deep-space science. These issues don’t respect national borders.”

Learning from a visiting journalist

Ling Xin’s visit to the class came through the Conference on World Affairs classroom visit program, which pairs CWA speakers with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder courses during conference week. The 78th annual CWA, running April 13–16, featured more than 60 speakers across 50 panels at the Limelight Hotel Boulder and across campus.

For Collins, the match was ideal. Ling Xin is one of a small number of journalists working in English who can draw on firsthand access to Chinese scientific institutions, fluency in Mandarin, and formal journalism training in the United States. A former writer for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, she holds a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University and has published in Science, Scientific American, Nature, and MIT Technology Review. She has reported extensively on China’s Chang’e lunar missions, the Tiangong space station, and the movement of Chinese scientists between US and Chinese institutions, a phenomenon known as the “reverse brain drain”.

“Having a journalist like Ling Xin in the classroom is a different experience from reading an article,” Collins said. “She can tell students what Chinese space scientists actually say when a reporter asks them about the competition with NASA”.

The timing of the visit was perfect. Artemis II had splashed down on April 10 after a successful nine-day circumlunar flight, making astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen the first humans to fly past the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Koch became the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit. The mission was a triumph (and a relief) after many delays.

But even as the Artemis II crew was being celebrated, the competitive landscape was shifting beneath the surface. NASA announced in February that the first crewed lunar landing has been pushed from Artemis III to Artemis IV, now targeted for 2028. The Lunar Gateway station was cancelled. And Congress effectively killed NASA’s Mars Sample Return program in the FY2026 spending bill, leaving nearly 30 carefully collected sample tubes sitting in Mars’s Jezero Crater with no funded plan to bring them home.

"Let's Go to the Moon!" by Yuko Shimizu

Accelerating push to space

China, meanwhile, is accelerating. Its Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission is targeted for launch in 2028, with samples expected back on Earth around 2031. If NASA doesn’t revive its own program, China will likely become the first nation to return Martian soil, a milestone with enormous scientific and symbolic weight. These debates are a key substance of class discussion.

“When you put an aerospace engineering student and a Chinese civilizations student in the same conversation about whether or not space should be treated as a global commons, you get an analysis that neither of them could produce alone,” Collins said. “Knowledge is co-created.”

The Wolf Amendment, a congressional provision renewed annually since 2011 that bars NASA from bilateral activities with Chinese space agencies, is a recurring thread in the course. The policy, which effectively excluded China from the International Space Station partnership, is widely credited with accelerating China’s independent development of the Tiangong station, the Long March 5 rocket family, and the full suite of crewed spaceflight technology that now positions the country as NASA’s primary competitor.

In 2026 alone, China plans to launch two crewed missions to Tiangong, including its first year-long stay, and host a Pakistani astronaut, the station’s first international crew member. The Chang’e-7 lunar probe, targeting the Moon’s south pole to search for water ice, is scheduled to launch later this year. A crewed lunar landing is targeted before 2030.

Collins also brings science fiction into the classroom to explore the cultural dimensions of space ambition. The global success of Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body Problem” trilogy has made Chinese science fiction a shared cultural reference point that crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. “Science fiction adds a layer that unites all of us,” Collins said. “These are universal concerns about what technology is doing to human civilization, especially now in the age of AI.”

The course is one of several electives offered through �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Space Minor, a campus-wide program open to students regardless of major that provides an interdisciplinary foundation in all aspects of space. The minor, part of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Grand Challenge initiative, requires five courses: the foundational “Pathway to Space” and four electives drawn from departments across the university, ranging from aerospace engineering to music to environmental design.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder has a singular claim on the subject. The university is the only academic institution in the world to have sent instruments to every planet in the solar system and Pluto, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has been a leader in space research since 1948.

“This university has extraordinary depth in the technical side of space,” Collins said. “What the Space Minor makes possible is courses like mine that bring the human dimensions like culture, history, geopolitics, and collaboration into the same conversation. That’s what students will need to navigate a world where the US and China are building competing lunar bases and competing for leadership in the space economy.”

ASIA 4100, “China’s Space Dream: Long March to the Moon and Beyond,” will next be offered in spring 2027. The course is open to all �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder students and counts toward the Space Minor.

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Top illustration: A Chinese flag added to famed photo of astronaut James Irwin on the moon. (Original photo: NASA)

Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:00:50 +0000

Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 08:00

Cody DeBos

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

In Abiquiú, New Mexico, vast mesas sprawl beneath an expansive blue sky. Among them sit the adobe walls of a home once inhabited by one of America’s most iconic artists. The interior is painted with light and characterized by quiet restraint reminiscent of the natural features outside.

It is here, in the home of Georgia O’Keeffe, that Giustina Renzoni helps visitors see both the artist’s work and the world that shaped it.

“When I first encountered Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, what struck me immediately was that it wasn’t just her residence. It was also a remarkable example of vernacular adobe architecture with nearly 200 years of history before she purchased it,” Renzoni says.

Giustina Renzoni, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MFA alumna, is the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico.

Now, as the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni’s day-to-day work involves a careful balance of sharing the space with visitors while also preserving the structure and its layers of history.

A path shaped at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder

Renzoni’s path to her current role began with a long-standing interest in the relationship between art and environment.

“I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of art, history and place,” she says. “Over time, I became especially interested in how artists’ environments shape their creative work.”

After studying art history and visual culture and gaining early experience working in museums, she pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the �鶹��Ѱ��.

“I chose �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder because it offered a program that encouraged interdisciplinary thinking. I was interested in exploring art history alongside visual culture, often through sociohistorical frameworks,” Renzoni says.

She also calls out the collaboration required when working in a museum and recalls how her time at �鶹��Ѱ��helped hone these skills.

“My time at �鶹��Ѱ��helped me develop the ability to think across those disciplines and see how they all contribute to interpreting art and history for the public. That interdisciplinary mindset has been incredibly valuable in my role at the O’Keeffe Museum.”

How place helps us understand art

At the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni oversees the preservation and interpretation of the Museum’s historic properties—O’Keeffe’s home in the village of Abiquiú and another at Ghost Ranch. The Abiquiú home welcomes thousands of visitors a year, while the Ghost Ranch home is currently closed to the public, awaiting renovations and preservation work Renzoni will head. Her work bridges scholarship and public experience, ensuring the physical spaces connected to O’Keeffe’s life remain protected while also giving visitors a chance to experience them.

Much of her work is rooted in a simple, but powerful, idea: To understand an artist, one must understand where and how they lived.

“Seeing the places where artists lived, the landscapes they looked at every day, and the objects they surrounded themselves with can reveal dimensions of their work that aren’t always visible in a gallery setting. For me, those spaces create a kind of context that brings the artwork to life,” Renzoni says.

The Abiquiú patio, bedroom and zaguán of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. (Photos: Krysta Jabczenski/© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

Though the art may be stunning, viewers can’t see the full picture when it is hanging on a featureless white wall.

“Historic spaces show the relationship between creative work and daily life. You see what an artist chose to keep around them, how they organized their studio and how the landscape shaped their perspective,” she says.

For Renzoni, one of the most compelling ways to explore that connection is through her recent exhibition, Artful Living: O’Keeffe & Modern Design, which is currently on view at the museum’s welcome center in Abiquiú.

“The exhibition explores how O’Keeffe transformed her traditional adobe home in Abiquiú into a distinctly modern living environment through furniture, textiles, and design objects,” Renzoni says. “What I find fascinating is that the house itself becomes a kind of three-dimensional expression of her artistic vision.”

Balancing preservation with public access

Preserving this one-of-a-kind environment, however, comes with challenges.

“The biggest is balancing preservation with access,” Renzoni says.

Historic homes like O’Keeffe’s weren’t designed for a steady stream of visitors. Even small interactions can cause lasting damage.

“Things like light exposure, temperature changes and foot traffic can all affect fragile materials,” Renzoni notes.

In Abiquiú, where O’Keeffe’s home is built from earthen adobe, those concerns are even more pronounced. Still, ensuring public access is essential.

“The goal is to create thoughtful ways for people to experience [these spaces] without compromising their long-term preservation,” Renzoni says.

Doing so requires careful coordination across disciplines, from conservation and collections management to education and visitor engagement.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context. In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

Reinterpreting O’Keeffe’s legacy 40 years later

Renzoni’s work feels especially timely in 2026, which marks the 40th anniversary of O’Keeffe’s death. Decades later, the artist’s work continues to resonate with audiences around the world.

“I think O’Keeffe resonates because her work feels both deeply personal and universal,” Renzoni says. “Her paintings of New Mexico, in particular, capture a sense of space, light and stillness that many people continue to find compelling today.”

Visiting the places where O’Keeffe lived can also reshape how people understand her work.

“Seeing those environments helps visitors understand that her work was deeply rooted in direct observation and in her relationship with the land,” Renzoni says.

Standing in Abiquiú, visitors witness how the scale of the sky, the geometry of adobe walls and the contours of the surrounding cliffs influenced an icon of American art, grounding her paintings in lived experience.

In the end, the spaces Renzoni preserves offer more than a glimpse into O’Keeffe’s life. They let visitors connect to O’Keeffe’s work on a deeper level, granting an understanding of how her work took shape that can be found nowhere else.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context,” Renzoni says. “In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

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Should we want to die?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:54:23 +0000

Should we want to die? Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 16:54

Iskra Fileva

The human condition ends in death, but is there anything to do besides simply accepting it?

We are mortal. We are all going to die. What is one to do about it? Nothing, according to the dominant position: One must accept the human lot, and if possible, accept it with equanimity.

Premature death is viewed as a tragedy, of course, and we sympathize with fear of the inevitable even on behalf of centenarians, yet attempts to extend human life significantly are viewed with suspicion. What kind of person, the thought appears to be, would attempt to overcome biological limitations on lifespan? Someone exceedingly greedy, surely. Or worse, someone forgetting himself, like the character Braddock from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “A Diamond as Big as Ritz,” who tries to bribe the Almighty with a very large diamond. Ultra-wealthy anti-aging champions such as Bryan Johnson seem to fit this schema and may provide support for it in the popular imagination, if unwittingly.

Iskra Fileva is a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder associate professor of philosophy who specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry.

Virtuous people, we think, may hope for immortality through their deeds or yearn for eternal bliss as an immaterial soul in heaven, but a desire for a much longer life in the literal sense is deemed unseemly. Research on life extension has, for many, the flavor of a Faustian bargain: We suspect that only those without scruples would try to cheat their way out of the human condition and avoid death.

On the other hand, we don’t want anyone to get too cozy with death either. While we may, if grudgingly, accept behaviors that increase the risk of death—think car racing or climbing the Himalayas—we don’t think it quite proper to assume control over the end of our lives, especially when that end isn’t otherwise imminent. I suspect, in fact, that widespread qualms about physician-assisted suicide have less to do with alleged worries about murderous doctors or relatives and more with the background assumption that death must come for us when it will and not when we choose.

To be sure, support for the two directives is not univocal—both life-extension research and the “right to die” movement have advocates—but it is very widespread. We thus seem to embrace two injunctions that pull in opposite directions: “Accept mortality” and “Don’t choose death.” Should we or shouldn’t we want to die?

Natural human lifespan

Perhaps the two directives can be reconciled by appealing to the idea of a natural human lifespan. We can say that a mature and virtuous person aims to live out roughly the span characteristic of our species and then die a natural death. On this view, one should accept temporal finitude without ever seeking to bring death about; open the door when the Grim Reaper comes knocking but stop short of trying to lure him in; face the inevitable without claiming authority over the schedule.

A crude version of this position can be easily shown implausible: After all, medicine can seem, in some ways, unnatural. But the proponent of the natural-lifespan view need not bite this particular bullet—she can argue, instead, that the proper role of medicine is restorative, not transformative. Medicine ought to ensure we get the number of years we are “owed” by correcting genetic errors or counteracting the effects of harmful environments without feeding fantasies of living for thousands of years.

But just what is so good, never mind normatively choice-worthy, about a natural lifespan and a natural death? I will take the first question first.

It has been suggested that a much longer life would get tedious or meaningless or both. Philosopher Bernard Williams, in “The Makropulos Case,” adduces considerations to that effect. The title of Williams’s essay is a reference to Elina Makropulos, a fictional character courtesy of writer Karel Čapek. Čapek’s Makropulos acquires the gift of life extension and initially takes advantage of it, but after living for several centuries, becomes apathetic, as if frozen in boredom. She continues to fear death, but at 300 plus, she is so jaded that she laughs when another character burns the document containing the secret of life extension.

Williams’ argument appeals to self-interest, not virtue, so even if it succeeded, it would not show anything untoward or Faustian about the desire for radical life extension, but let’s set this point aside. I suspect that Williams’ view, and Čapek’s, likely expresses what is sometimes called “an adaptive preference”: that is, a tendency to see the attainable as better than the unattainable, whatever the alternatives’ underlying characteristics. We don’t have life-extension methods, so we might as well tell ourselves that human lifespan is best as is. Moreover, barring the possibility of a dystopia in which anti-aging treatments are obligatory, no one in a world with life-extension techniques would be forced to live longer than they wished, so there is no need whatsoever to browbeat each other into adopting a preference for current lifespans.

I must note here that I don’t know how many believe the prudential argument anyhow. For it is also sometimes suggested that were anti-aging treatments to become available, their price would be prohibitive for most people. Yet, if a significantly longer life was not an attractive prospect, the potentially high price tag of life extension treatment would bother no one. As for the price argument considered independently, the obvious response is that we should work to make the treatments affordable rather than try to persuade ourselves that we’d have no use for them anyway.

The unborn

Another argument put forward has to do with morality rather than with self-interest: What about the unborn? When do they get to live? If we slow down aging by a lot, we’d need to drastically reduce the number of births as well.

This argument is well intentioned, but I don’t think it is good enough. No merely possible person is owed a chance to be born. A merely possible person is not a person at all, so there isn’t anyone that such a chance may be owed to. (Think of all your merely possible siblings or children. Who are they? How many of them are there?) The people who die every day due to old age, by contrast, are quite real.

But the most important point I wish to make in response to the pro natural lifespans position is this: Our intuitions of what lifespans are “fair” for us to expect are anchored in current lifespans, which are an accident. We could have evolved to live for thousands of years, like bristlecone pine trees, in which case we’d think it perfectly fine and not greedy at all to live that long. Or we could have evolved to live for several months, like many mice, and then wishing to live for 80 years may have seemed to us terribly selfish, nay Faustian.

That may be, my opponent may say, but we haven’t evolved that way. Granted, our intuitions are thoroughly shaped by the contingencies of our evolutionary history. Still, we mustn’t discard them for all that: We mustn’t because we don’t know what life would be like if we did live much longer. Forget fairness to the unborn and consider self-interest again. Had we evolved to live for many more years, one might say, we’d probably have psychological features that allow for good longer lives, but we haven’t. Given that, extending life is a risky business, a leap into the unknown. What if anti-aging techniques turn out to be a Pandora’s box, and we end up saddling ourselves with greatly extended but very miserable lives?

Gauging what is good for us

A cynic may quip that it’s not as though we are all currently thriving, but let’s bracket that retort. The argument from deeply ingrained features of human psychology should not be dismissed lightly. There is a certain wisdom in taking naturalness as a heuristic that helps us gauge what is good for us.

While there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans, virtue does require that we desire mortality.

That's an argument for proceeding with caution, not against proceeding at all.

To be clear, I do not intend to propose a different optimal lifespan. It may well be that even were we to live for thousands of years, many would desire more. (This is the main theme in what may be the first sci-fi novel, Voltaire’s Micromegas. Elsewhere, I call this the blessing and curse of imagination.) My point here is simply that having a choice to live longer is better than not having that choice.

I conclude from here that there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans. Virtue does not require that we desire mortality.

But does it prohibit desiring death on a given day?

It is difficult to see why. Note that a heroic self-sacrifice is seen as not only compatible with but also exemplifying virtue, so the question would have to be whether one may choose death for self-interested reasons.

The idea tends to make us squeamish. Since death is irreversible, the squeamishness is all well and good, but ought we moralize it?

No one argues that a virtuous person cannot prefer mortality in general, and some, as we saw, claim that she must prefer it. So why can’t one choose death on a particular day? What is so virtuous about dying only when you don’t want to?

There is a much longer discussion to be had about this than I can offer in this essay, but for present purposes, I wish to say the following: In opting to die, a person may hurt loved ones, of course. This is not a trivial matter. However, loved ones, in turn, must consider the person’s own preferences. (Entrepreneur Salim Ismail reports that his father chose euthanasia and spent the last days of his life in a blissful state. Ismail asked the attending physician about this, and she said that 20,000 people had had the procedure and that most of them spent their final days in a similarly happy state, adding, “We think it is because they have agency.”[1])

Or is the thought that it would be somehow terrible for society as a whole if someone were to choose death for private reasons?

A character named “Mr. Tredegar” in Edith Wharton’s novel The Fruit of the Tree adopts some such view in the course of an argument with a nurse named Justine Brent. Wharton writes:

“Human life is sacred,” he said sententiously.

“Ah, that must have been decreed by someone who had never suffered!” Justine exclaimed.

Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her friend's suffering: "Society decreed it—not one person," he corrected.

“Society—science—religion!” she murmured, as if to herself.

“Precisely. It’s the universal consensus—the result of the world’s accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances—necessary for the general welfare.”

Yet the appeal to general welfare is unpersuasive. We cannot impose on each other a day full of experiences that the recipient does not wish to have. The prolongation of life of a person unwilling to live is but many such days.

What, then, explains the Tredegars of the world?

My strong suspicion is that the answer, once again, lies in the naturalness heuristic. It seems to us against nature’s injunctions for a person to end her life. But an otherwise healthy and helpful heuristic, when too rigidly held, may become a superstition. I suspect, in fact, that it is precisely an awareness that we are in the grips of something like that superstition which partly explains why we tend to oppose life-extension: We fear the motivational grip of “naturalness” intuitions and worry that in a world with life extension, we might end up accidentally saddling ourselves with very long undesirable lives.

It is quite possible that if radical life extension became possible, there would be some who don’t wish to live any longer but who, having opted for another several hundred years, would be unable to end it all, a bit like a person unable to walk away from a cult or a very bad job. The problem may be exacerbated by the fact that in the alternative world, people in this position may appear and biologically be thirty-five even if they have already lived for three and a half centuries.

Still, we successfully combat instincts (including the survival instinct, if doing so could help save a loved one’s life) and rethink heuristics. At any rate, the question is whether this is what we should try to do or whether, instead, we must continue to maintain that a mature and virtuous person would always choose mortality but somehow never, on any given day, choose death.

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The human condition ends in death, but is there anything to do besides simply accepting it?

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A new era of gunboat diplomacy?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:33:22 +0000

A new era of gunboat diplomacy? Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 15:33

Tony Wood

Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke an earlier era of U.S. policy—and the rise of anti‑imperialism it helped spur

In Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the second Trump administration has adopted an increasingly aggressive policy.

From drone strikes on purported drug traffickers to increased tariffs on imports, and from the blockade on fuel shipments and threats of invasion in Cuba to the Jan. 3 military incursion into Venezuela, the U.S.’s more coercive approach to its hemispheric neighbors evokes an earlier period of U.S. foreign policy.

Many commentators have found echoes of the 1989 capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Others highlighted the longer history of U.S. interventions in Latin America stretching back through the Cold War. That includes the Nixon administration’s support for the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the CIA-sponsored removal of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954.

Tony Wood, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder assistant professor of history, specializes in the political and social history of modern Latin America.

Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one Latin American country after another. This practice was often justified by the Roosevelt Corollary, President Theodore Roosevelt’s addition to the Monroe Doctrine. In cases of “chronic wrongdoing,” Roosevelt said in 1904, the U.S would find itself compelled to exercise an “international police power” in defense of U.S. interests.

But crucially, how Latin Americans responded to the U.S. exerting its dominance in the early 20th century may hold some lessons for the present day. One of the major side effects of the U.S.’s so-called gunboat diplomacy was an upsurge of resistance and anti-imperialist thinking in the region’s political life.

The roots of anti-imperialism

In the 30 years after Roosevelt asserted the U.S.’s right to intervene across the hemisphere, U.S. forces occupied Cuba three times—in 1906-09, 1912 and 1917-21. They also occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. In Nicaragua, the U.S. deployed the Marines from 1912 to 1925 and then again from 1926 to 1933, waging a counterinsurgency in which it used aerial bombardment for the first time.

Across much of the region, then, this was a time when the U.S. was quick to resort to force, unburdened by any concerns for Latin American countries’ sovereignty.

Yet this era of external intervention also coincided with a period of remarkable political ferment, which I describe in my recently published book, Radical Sovereignty.

In one place after another, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and from Havana to Lima, movements sprang up that put forward sharp critiques of U.S power. Many of them grew out of student organizations in the late 1910s, while others drew on the rising strength of labor unions and newly formed leftist political parties.

In 1923, rural workers in the Mexican state of Veracruz formed a Peasant League. From the outset, they saw local issues as closely interwoven with international ones, and they argued that there was a compelling reason for this. As the league put it, “Our internationalism is not the child of a crazed enthusiasm for empty phrases … but of the need to take preventive measures, to bolster ourselves against the enemy,” which they identified as “the imperialism of North America.”

Many of Latin America’s radical movements at this time were inspired by the recent example of the Mexican Revolution. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917 had nationalized the country’s land and natural resources, putting it on a collision course with U.S. companies and landowners.

Emiliano Zapata (seated, center), was a Mexican revolutionary who employed guerrilla tactics during and after the Mexican Revolution (Photo: Library of Congress)

Others still were energized by the global repercussions of the Russian Revolution. This, of course, included several brand-new communist parties across the region. But at the time, many others in Latin America saw the Bolsheviks as part of a global anti-colonial wave.

Mexico City as activist hub

My book explores the key role Mexico City played as a gathering point for these different political tendencies.

They included groups ranging from Mexican peasant leagues to the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, an anti-imperialist movement formed by Peruvian exiles. Many of these organizations converged under the umbrella of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas. Founded in Mexico City in 1925, it soon had chapters in a dozen more countries across the region.

Between them, these movements brought into focus the novel features of U.S. power. As the Cuban student leader and communist Julio Antonio Mella saw it in 1925 – at a time when his native country was highly dependent on the U.S. but formally sovereign—the U.S. was distinct. Unlike European empires, it largely refrained from direct control of territories, though it had pressed the Cubans to include in their 1901 constitution a provision allowing it to intervene in the island at will.

In Mella’s view, the U.S. was clearly an empire, one that mainly exercised its dominance through commercial or financial pressures. For him, the dollar and Wall Street were as central to U.S. power as the halls of government in Washington, D.C.

For Ricardo Paredes, an Ecuadorean doctor who founded the country’s Socialist Party in 1926, a new term was required to capture Latin American countries’ contradictory position. Formally sovereign, they were not colonies as such. Yet they were economically and politically subordinated to Washington and Wall Street—“dependent countries,” as he phrased it in 1928.

For the Peruvian poet Magda Portal, a leading member of the anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, U.S. dominance played out differently in different parts of Latin America.

Fidel Castro (standing, center left) was influenced by the anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In a series of lectures she gave in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1929, Portal divided the region into zones. While countries such as Argentina or Brazil were mainly sites for U.S. investment, Mexico and the Caribbean were regularly subjected to U.S. military force. Or, as Portal put it, “Here imperialism wears no disguise.”

Portal concluded her lectures with a phrase that combined her analysis of U.S. dominance with a resonant appeal for unity: “We have a single and great enemy; let us form a single and great union.”

United states of resistance?

Yet while there was much Latin American anti-imperialist thinkers could agree on, there were also profound divergences between them. This included questions of strategy as well as issues of principle. What role should different classes play in their movement? How radical a transformation of society were they pushing for? And what kind of state should emerge from it?

Over time, these differences turned into deep rifts that pitted revolutionaries against democratic reformists, internationalists against nationalists, and pro-Soviets against anti-communists. These disagreements played an important role in Latin American politics over the rest of the century.

While many of these rifts became especially prominent during the Cold War, they developed out of earlier divisions over how best to counter U.S. dominance.

The anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s was formative for a generation of Latin American radicals. Several of those who entered political life during these years went on to play key roles in major events of the 20th century. Raúl Roa, for example, who served as foreign secretary for Cuba’s revolutionary government from 1959 to 1976, was first politicized in the island’s anti-imperialist movement of the 1920s.

The men and women whose political visions were formed in the interwar period carried those ideals forward into the Cold War era. In important ways, the 1920s and 1930s laid vital groundwork for later and better-known radical movements.

Past is, of course, not always prologue. It is impossible to predict what the long-term consequences of current U.S. policy in Latin America will be, especially given the rightward tilt that is currently unfolding across the region.

But looking at the region’s anti-imperialist traditions does point to one possible outcome: The U.S.’s newly aggressive stance will, sooner rather than later, fuel a resurgence of anti-imperialist sentiment as the organizing principle for a new generation of activists.

Tony Wood is an assistant professor in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of History specializing in the political and social history of modern Latin America.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke era of gunboat diplomacy—and the rise of anti‑imperialism it helped spur.

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