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Loneliness Unsolved
This article explores the modern phenomenon of loneliness, tracing its emergence as a widespread societal concern and examining its potential causes and impacts. It discusses various perspectives on loneliness, from historical to contemporary research, highlighting how societal changes and technological advancements have influenced social connections. The piece concludes by suggesting that current feelings of isolation may be part of a larger evolutionary process, as society adapts to new forms of connection and community in the digital age08-31-2024
Articles
Autocracy and the Destruction of Language
Roger BerkowitzMasha Gessen’s newest book argues that Donald Trump is paving the way for the end of American democracy and the rise of autocracy. Whether Gessen is right, their argument about how President Trump attacks language attacks a shared world of meaning necessary for democracy is right. Gessen founds their argument on insights from Hannah Arendt...
06-04-2020
The Case of Michael Flynn
Roger BerkowitzI’ve written about the controversy over the prosecution of Michael Flynn. On the one hand, the effort by the Trump administration to drop charges against Flynn smacks of an authoritarian interference with the independent judiciary and the rule of law. On the other hand, there are questions about the original prosecution itself as an overreach by security agencies.
06-04-2020
What Opens?
Roger BerkowitzMelvin Rogers argues that the protests and riots convulsing Minneapolis and the United States are about more than the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman. “The anger and rage on display in Minneapolis is not only about police violence, however. It is taking place against a broad horizon of state violence, which among other things takes the form of utter disregard for the pain of black Americans.”
05-30-2020
Flynn Redux
Roger BerkowitzIn an earlier post about Michael Flynn, I linked to Matt Taibbi’s essay arguing that Flynn was mistakenly prosecuted by an overzealous FBI. Now Eli Lake has published a detailed and devastating account of the way the FBI railroaded Flynn. The importance of these stories is that the resistance to Trump continues to put its faith in the FBI and other institutions and to base its case against President Trump on the...
05-28-2020
Silence = Death
Roger BerkowitzThe AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer died this week. Kramer started ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987 to fight hard for both gay rights and action against AIDS. His uncompromising activism and fight reinvented civil disobedience in the 1980s and 1990s, giving birth to tactics that have come to define democratic activism.
05-28-2020
What We Are Reading:
Normal Changes All the Time
Roger BerkowitzRebecca Traister tells the incredible story of Marga Griesbach, now 92 and a survivor of—well of everything. Griesbach just recently made it back from a harrowing cruise to her home in Washington state. She was born Marga Steinhardt in Germany in 1927.
05-28-2020
What We Are Reading:
“Hannah Arendt Changed My Life”
Roger BerkowitzJames Wallner has published a “review” of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition on the occasion of the new edition that appeared last year from the University of Chicago Press.
05-28-2020
Post-Truth
Roger BerkowitzMartin Gurri argues that truth is based on trust. Trust in turn requires some authority in whom we trust. If we trust not in God, then we may trust in science or in experts, or in the people collectively amassed in a self-governing state. But we live, as Hannah Arendt argues, in an age when authority is no longer feasible. It is beyond doubt, Arendt writes, that “authority has vanished from the modern world.” And yet Arendt does not despair.
05-28-2020
What Would Have Been If He Had Spoke
Roger BerkowitzRolf Hochhuth died last week. Hochhuth was the author of The Deputy, A Christian Tragedy that premiered on the Freie Volksbühne stage in West Berlin in February 1963, making the author world-famous. The play is a documentary inquiry into the decision by Pope Pius XII to remain silent regarding the Holocaust, about which he knew.
05-20-2020