Articles

Tik Tok and the Online Panopticon

Tobias Hess
In 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.

The N-Word

Roger Berkowitz
When 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.

Judgment and the Public world
 

Roger Berkowitz
Seyla Benhabib reviews a series of new books on Hannah Arendt and in the process offers a strong interpretation of Arendt’s thinking about Judgment. As we prepare to read Hannah Arendt’s writings on judgment in the Virtual Reading Group, Benhabib’s account rightly sees judgment as an essential political activity of building a shared world.
 

Artificial Intelligence and Total Domination

Roger Berkowitz
George Soros asks why it is that the chances for war between the United States and China have increased so markedly in recent decades. His answer is the rise of technology and specifically artificial intelligence.

Consequences for Private Speech

Roger Berkowitz
The Academic Freedom Alliance has written a letter protesting the suspension and investigation of Professor Ilya Shapiro by the Georgetown University Law Center. Shapiro tweeted: “Because Biden said he’s only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached. Fitting that the Court takes up affirmative action next term."

The 2020 Election

Roger Berkowitz
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) has issued what the Wall Street Journal calls the best report on what really happened in the 2020 elections.

The Right Danger

Roger Berkowitz
Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner argue that the real danger to American Constitutional democracy comes from the failure of conservatives to stand up to former President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine a presidential election. 

The Political Rise of the Family Business

Roger Berkowitz
Melinda Cooper argues that the Trump Republican Party represents the "insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.”

Against Memory

Roger Berkowitz
Nicolas Tenzer looks at attempts to destroy “Memorial,” a group founded by the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov that sought to expose Stalin’s crimes.