Articles

The Hellscape That is Facebook

Roger Berkowitz
Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher interview Rick Wilson, the former Republican consultant behind the Lincoln Project. Amidst a wide-ranging discussion, Wilson explains why Facebook is the most important and most destructive political tool for political manipulation ever invented.

Heinrich Bluecher 

Ringo Roesener
Hannah Arendt’s husband Heinrich Bluecher was an exceptional and much admired teacher of philosophy at the New School for Social Research and Bard College. Bluecher came from a different generation. He never earned a doctorate, or published. He was what Arendt called a “Socratic character.”

What We Are Reading
The Self-Interest of White Fragility

Roger Berkowitz
Ross Douthat offers one of the best and most original explanations of the attraction of the new ideology of white fragility. 

Special Contribution: Our Space 

Dariel Vasquez
Dariel Vasquez is a first generation college graduate from Harlem, NY. Dariel graduated from Bard College (Class of 2017) with a joint degree in History and Sociology, and a concentration in Africana-Studies. He is the founder and director of Brothers@. Youth development and mentorship is Dariel’s passion, and he’s been working with young men of color since he was 16 years old.

A Letter from Roger Berkowitz

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt cannot solve the problems of our world.  But her bold, provocative, and  fearless  thinking  is a model for how we can think about the problems we confront today. At the Hannah Arendt  Center we don't worship Hannah Arendt. But we seek to nurture the kind of worldly, humanities-based  thinking about ethics and politics that Arendt so fully embodied. 

The Canceler in Chief

Roger Berkowitz
There is an apparent myth going around that cancel culture is a phenomenon of the political left. One sees this in the reaction to the Open Letter in Harpers that I signed last week. There was in that letter no mention of “the left.” The letter explicitly mentioned the danger from illiberalism from both the political right and Donald Trump as well as from cultural intolerance for curiosity and experimental thinking.

What We Are Reading:
The Universal Editor

Samantha Hill
Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times this week in an open letter, citing the effect social media has had on traditional publishing platforms.

Whiteness Talk and Class Talk

Roger Berkowitz
Daniel Denvir interviews Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, the sisters who wrote the extraordinary book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. The Field sisters coin the word “Racecraft” to name the magical process through which the fiction of race is made real. When a police officer who is black is conjured as a black man, this conjuring trick is what allows that officer to be discriminated against or even killed

A Jewish Home

Roger Berkowitz
Peter Beinart acknowledges what he calls “the painful truth” that there is not going to be a two-state solution in the Middle East. Given that reality, Beinart asks, what is the path forward? Growing numbers of Palestinians embrace a one-state solution. But in Israel and amongst Jews, the one-state solution crosses a red line, since it would likely mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.