Articles

Old Letters From Loved Ones

Jacob Rivers
The latest issue of Poetry Magazine, guested edited by poets Tara Betts and Joshua Bennett, focuses on work written by currently and formerly incarcerated poets, bringing a systematically suppressed chorus of voices to the forefront of the poetry community’s publishing landscape. Editor Tara Betts writes in her introduction to the issue, “The contributors, who are often no longer perceived as people in the non-incarcerated world, are indeed human.

We All Should Have Something to Hide

Roger Berkowitz
One repeated argument against apps that allow for encryption and privacy is that those who have nothing to hide should not worry about the loss of privacy. But who is it that has nothing to hide? The human heart and mind is a factory of fantasies that remind each of us of the darkness that lurks within us.

The Politics of Small Things

Roger Berkowitz
Jeffrey Goldfarb writes that his 2006 book The Politics of Small Things was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that “politics is about people meeting each other as equals in their differences, speaking and acting together.” In his Democracy Seminar, Goldfarb invites activists to speak about the ways they act together.

The Credentialed Few

Roger Berkowitz
Jennifer Senior writes that the reason Congress is out of touch is not that it has too many millionaires, but that it is filled with people with too many academic credentials. This is a fact central to the argument for sortition—the selection of representatives by lot rather than by election. The Arendt Center held a webinar asking the question of whether it would be good to bring randomly selected citizens into the legislative process in October.

Moving Past Race Reductionism

Roger Berkowitz
I recently wrote about a study by Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert D. Putnam who argue that—contrary to popular expectations—the years in which black Americans performed best on metrics of economic and social prosperity were before the Civil Rights Movement; Garrett and Putnam show that since the 1970s, black achievement has stagnated. How does this fact require that we reassess both the Civil Rights Movement and the new Movement for Black Lives? 

Institutional Conservatism

David Kilon interviews Corey Robin about the real dangers posed by Trumpism and the new conservatism of the Republican Party. Hint, it is not authoritarianism. 

Elusive Racial Progress

Roger Berkowitz
In a common narrative, racial progress in the United States was slow or non-existent until the Civil Rights Movement, at which time there was a sustained improvement in racial equality. Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert D. Putnam argue that this view is not born out by facts. On the contrary, the years in which black Americans performed best on metrics of economic and social prosperity were before the Civil Rights Movement; since the 1970s, black achievement has stagnated.

Tania Bruguera was Arrested

Tania Bruguera, the Cuban-American artist, founder of the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (Instar) in Havana, and former NEH/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Fellow here at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has been arrested and placed under house arrest.

Wholeness

In an interview with Ben Klutsey, Danielle Allen explains her idea of “wholeness” as an ideal of American society over and against the unity of e pluribus unum.