For his final paper in his high school Journalism class, Zack chose to focus on Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, reflecting on death, parks, and other connections.

In the wake of the death of his fellow student, Johanna Justin-Jinich, Zack offers a haunting meditation on death, meaning, and experience.

Written in December of 2009 for an unknown class, “Imagining Agamben’s Politics of Pure Means” shows Zack’s continued engagement with the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and a constellation of thinkers including Foucault, Bataille, Heidegger, Aristotle, and Irigaray to examine the roots of the Western concept of the “body politic” through Agamben’s theories of the entanglement of life and politics – both the many ways violence and discrimination have been enacted upon bodies in modern politics, and where “playful” embodiment offers an opportunity for activism and community. These themes were a staple of Zack’s writing and thinking in his last two years of college and beyond, extending to his own political activism and collaboration with groups like Playing With Reality and Odyssey Works.

Written in 2010 for a Social Theory Seminar hosted by sociology professor Charles Lemert (who reviewed the paper as “superb in all respects except its tardiness”), Zack’s draft brings together a wide scope of thinkers and theoretical lineages in conversation around our understanding of time, ethics, and human agency. Paired with supplementary readings including Giorgio Agamben’s Infancy and History and The Coming Community, and an excerpt from Karan Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, the paper continues Zack’s deep interest in the fundamentals of human experience, relations, and how the communication of inner life gives rise to the foundations of political and ethical structures.

In this essay, Zack puts Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming and Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway into dialogue with one another using what he calls a “diffractive methodology…that marks not just ‘where differences appear but where the effects of differences appear.’” Where Keller’s “tehomic theology” points to “an otherness of cosmos bottomlessly preceding and exceeding human language” Barad’s “agential realism” turns its focus to the “indeterminancy of matter” and the “possibilites for the ongoing materialization of the world.” Zack also brings in the writings of St. Augustine and Jacques Derrida to broaden his discussion.

In this essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire, Zack examines how Nabokov’s narrator-protagonists, Humbert and Kinbote, fail to “accept the contradiction between life and art and go mad struggling to actualize the ideal in the real world.” Paying close attention to the novels’ imagery, Zack argues that Nabokov’s protagonists “distort and deflate Romantic principles…to justify their solipsistic disinterest in the plight of other people.”