Articles

Pay Attention

Roger Berkowitz
Elliot Holt picks a poem on the first day of every month and reads it every day that month. He reads it aloud. Often he memorizes the poem. For Holt, this daily meditation on the same poem for a month allows him to move from reading the poem to embodying the poem.

Diversity Mathematics

Roger Berkowitz
Three leading mathematicians Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman argue that the United States is falling behind in mathematics and other fields in large part because of its rejection of a pedagogy based on merit. The three mathematicians embrace efforts to improve math education for all and claim that this is the best way to support non-immigrant black and hispanic citizens.

The College Pyramid

Roger Berkowitz
Rebecca Gordon asks about the ethics of teaching in Universities where students increasingly graduate with immense debt and few meaningful prospects. She notes that “The average number of doctorates earned over the last decade is almost 53,000 annually. In other words, we're talking about nearly 530,000 PhDs produced by American higher education in those 10 years alone.

In AI We Trust

The Hannah Arendt Humanities Network of OSUN partnered with the Central European University (CEU) and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna to award Helga Nowotny, former President of the European Research Council and Professor Emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, the first annual Yehuda Elkana Fellowship.

The Power of Science

Roger Berkowitz
Four years ago after the election of Donald Trump, protesters around the country held rallies for science. Few in those rallies noticed the irony, that by engaging in political protests in favor of science they were contributing to the politicization of science. Now Tunku Varadarajan asks how science has become politicized.

The Flight from Reality

Roger Berkowitz
Last week I linked to an essay by Felix Heidenreich questioning Arendt’s mythic status in Germany. This week Rebecca Panovka publishes an essay arguing that “Hannah Arendt’s fans misread the post-truth presidency.” Panovka, who clearly counts herself one of Arendt’s ardent readers, begins by noting Arendt’s well-known disdain for the famously picayune fact-checkers at The New Yorker...

Revitalizing Democracy

Roger Berkowitz
In October the Hannah Arendt Center will host its conference, “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.” We will host activists, thinkers, and scholars from around the world thinking about new ways of reimagining democracy, especially around the idea of sortition—the use of randomly selected citizens to engage in participatory democratic citizen assemblies to suggest and even make legislative changes.

Friendliness

Roger Berkowitz
A new study from the Survey Center on American Life confirms what studies have been showing for decades, that Americans increasingly have fewer friends. The number of American men who say they have “no close friends” has increased from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021. To live without friends is terrifying; it is to risk being adrift, without support and love.

Revitalising Democracy: Citizen Juries as a Response to the Failure of Expert Rule

Roger Berkowitz

I was in Ljubljana in early June to speak at a conference, “What Kind of Government?” You can watch recordings of the talks including my own talk “Revitalising Democracy: Citizen Juries as a Response to the Failure of Expert Rule.”