Matthew Scully

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.--Genesis 1:24-26In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with simple dignity and compassion.Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong.In Dominion, we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency.Throughout Dominion, Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives.The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us.

“Some animals, if they could put words to their encounters with humanity, would extol our gentleness and amazing altruism; others would ask how we can be so ruthless. We rightly question ourselves sometimes, wanting to better align what we believe with what we do or permit. We wouldn’t be ‘the rational animal’ if we didn’t. What do we owe our fellow creatures? What does justice require?”Fear Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Merciless People searches for answers to questions that people of good will have always asked about the treatment of animals. The book shines a light on practices and industries that leave us uneasy when we hear about them, because they are so plainly inconsistent with the just and compassionate societies we aspire to be.With fresh and compelling arguments, in a style the late Christopher Hitchens described as “beautiful and witty prose,” former presidential speechwriter Matthew Scully asks us to look clearly at often horrific abuses in animal agriculture, blood sport, scientific research, and other industries, using reasoned moral judgment to advance an ethic of love and respect for our fellow creatures.The book collects three decades of published writings—from The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and elsewhere—as a sequel to Scully’s 2002 The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, a work many readers have called life-changing. “Dominion,” wrote New York Times reviewer Natalie Angier, “is a horrible, wonderful, important book. . . . [A] beautiful book, rich with thought, and a balm to the scared, lonely animal in us all.”Because animals are all so powerless before us, as Scully writes in a preface to Fear Factories, they are “a test of conscience for us all. Far from being some minor, peripheral ethical dispute we can leave to the philosophers or worry about some other time, the way we treat animals is a crucial, urgent, defining issue for humanity.”

One fine day Micky takes a walk into the forest and then something unexpected happens...

A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of DemocracyDemocratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy , Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors―including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman― Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance―both aesthetic and political―inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things.

These poems capture my 35-year love affair with my wife, Anna Mae, who recently passed away from stage three ovarian cancer. She loved me unconditionally, and in return, I endeavored to give her countless reasons to feel cherished. Anna Mae was my everything, and her loss has left me devastated. Witnessing her battle with the illness and undergoing chemotherapy inspired me to write and express my emotions. In these poems, I weave our life story, celebrating the decades we shared.We first came together when I was just sixteen and spent twenty years together before tying the knot in 2007. I suppose I wanted to be absolutely certain she was the one for me - though, in hindsight, there was never any doubt. In 2000, we expanded our family by adopting five nieces and nephews, three girls and two boys, embarking on an extraordinary journey together. I always strived to bring happiness to my wife, embodying the essence of the quote, 'It doesn't take much to make a woman happy, but it takes even less to piss her off.'In January 2023, Anna Mae succumbed to her battle with cancer. To my loving wife, now in heaven, these poems are for you. Thank you for joining me on this incredible ride.