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Civil Disobedience and the Spirit of American Democracy
As fear and retaliation become tools of political control, this piece calls for collective dissent to defend democratic norms and constitutional freedoms under increasing pressure from the Trump administration.04-20-2025
Articles
Useless Freedoms
Roger BerkowitzPeter Maguire reminisces about his time at Bard when his “teachers cared about my education, they did not care about my ego.” Maguire reprints some of the comments he received on the end of term criteria sheets that Bard professors still fill out for every student.
03-13-2022
A Decade in a Week
Roger BerkowitzIt was Vladimir Lenin who said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” And now it is Vladimir Putin who has punctuated Lenin’s remarks. Our world has changed.
03-06-2022
Simone Weil on War and Justice
Roger BerkowitzThe Jewish born Christian philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how to respect it, is capable of love and justice.” What war teaches, Weil argues, is the experience of utter misery, the reduction of man to a mere thing, a plaything of fate.
03-06-2022
The First TikTok War
Tobias HessThe recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia marks not just a seismic change in the global geopolitical order, but a historiographical shift in how citizens take in the documentation of war.
03-06-2022
Russia Invades Ukraine
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt wrote about war, genocide, and totalitarianism. Her mantra was to look reality squarely in the face and seek to understand it and to resist it. But first to understand it. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is a human tragedy. It is also a geopolitical earthquake that threatens to transform the world in which we live.
02-27-2022
In Memoriam, P.J. O’Rourke
Roger BerkowitzP.J. O’Rourke died this week. His satirical essays on American democracy are essential reading, including my favorite “At Home in the Parliament of Whores”—a send up of a local town hall meeting in the fictional town of Blaterboro, loosely based on O’Rourke’s home in New Hampshire.
02-19-2022
Demographics Is Not Destiny
Roger BerkowitzIt is a widespread faith amongst many on the left that the coming majority minority population will lead to increasingly left-wing politics. Mickey Kaus offers 14 reasons why this is wrong and dangerous.
02-19-2022
Tik Tok and the Online Panopticon
Tobias HessIn January the internet was set ablaze with stories of a man nicknamed "West Elm Caleb." Sasha Sloat writes for Wired about the ways that Tik Tok and algorithmic social media facilitates a state of group-play that can quickly devolve from creative collaborative exchange into events of mass social obsession with severe implications.
02-13-2022
The N-Word
Roger BerkowitzWhen a video went viral of Joe Rogan using the N-word over 20 times in the past 12 years, the effort to cancel him and have his podcast removed from Spotify hit a wall.
02-13-2022