David A. Westbrook Intermittent Signal

"Conclusion: Will It End?" is Chapter 15 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020). 

"Is Security Modern?" is Chapter 14 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter is about ways the understanding of "security" built up in this book inform and reflect various understandings of "modern," and so of our time.

"Security and the Humanization of Bureaucracy" is Chapter 13 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter attempts to revise commonplace normative understandings of bureaucracy. 

"Violence, Legitimacy, and the State" is Chapter 12 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter is a rereading of Weber's famous definition of the state. 

"The Resilience of the Individual" is Chapter 11 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter is about the different ways individuals respond to terror attacks.

"The Glamor of Security" is Chapter 10 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter is about some of the ways violence is glamorized, and what that might suggest about our politics.

"Leviathan Sometimes" is Chapter 9 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter revisits the Hobbesian imagination of the state as the author of violence and order and . . . complicates matters.  Especially for those who might wish to speak truth to power, as the saying goes.

"Constraints: Conflicted Domains, Scarce Resources, Limited Agency" is Chapter 8 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter is about the limitations, sometimes amounting to helplessness, of putatively powerful bureaucracies.

"Security by Design" is Chapter 7 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter is about the inscription of our anxieties into our built environment.

"Learning from Experience, or Not" is Chapter 6 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020).  This chapter is about the institutional difficulties of turning history into policy.

This is the audio version of the sixth part of Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020) by Mark Maguire and David A. Westbrook. The fundamental problem with security is epistemological: since the enterprise is oriented towards the future, what is to be done cannot be known. Thus the prevailing mood, for all the pretense toward rationality,...

This is the audio version of the fifth part of Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020) by Mark Maguire and David A. Westbrook. This is Chapter Four, “The Mysterious Public,” a word imbricated in complicated ways with the very notion of security, the legitimation of violence, and so the state, to say nothing of the environment we inhabit. V...

This is Chapter 3 of Maguire and Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern, "The Secret College."  In it, we begin our discussion of the social structures in this world.

Part Three of the audiobook for Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.  This part discusses the political character of "security," and why "security" cannot be "solved."

Part Two of the audiobook for Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.

This is the first part of an audiobook, Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.  The text has been published by Routledge, and is generally available.

Part II of my book, Welcome to New Country: Music for Today's America, available in print on Amazon.

Part II of my book Smith Lake.

An introduction, and the beginning, of my book Welcome to New Country: Music for Today's America.  Popular music as window into meanings, personal and even constitutional, for the way so many of us live. 

The limitations and excitement of the photo essay as a form, and my efforts to use it to articulate some subjectivities of the era just past, between the Global Financial Crisis and the Covid Pandemic.

Our situation in time and space, festivals, and finding something special right here, right now, wherever and whenever that might be.  Impressions.  History, great local food and drink.  Appreciation.

Reflections on the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan, and why so little was learned from our war in Vietnam. Music by Vince Parlato; photo Vincent Littrell. 

A consideration of the killing of Soleimaini, in light of (renewed?) hopes for the liberal international order.

The pandemic, both the physical disease and in the body politic, over the last years, as engaged by a writer marooned on a mountain.   Cultural critique, existential struggle, and poetics -- with recipes.

The pandemic, both the physical disease and in the body politic, over the last years, as engaged by a writer marooned on a mountain.   Cultural critique, existential struggle, and poetics -- with recipes.