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Only Power Can Check Power
Hannah Arendt saw America’s strength in its dispersion of power, rooted in civic engagement and local governance. As executive authority expands, the true challenge is not just legal resistance but the reinvigoration of collective action. Can we reclaim the founding spirit of self-governance, or will we cede our power to those who seek to consolidate it? 02-02-2025
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An Appeal, A Denial, and A Letter Published
The following is a letter sent by Alan Sussman to the Board of Directors of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Sussman is a trustee of one donor-advised-fund managed by the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and he asked the Federation to send $1,000 to a group that opposes Israel's occupation of the West Bank. To his surprise and chagrin, his request to donate his family's money was denied.09-03-2019
What We're Reading
By Samantha HillMike Jay writes about Walter Benjamin and Intoxication and Kathryn M. Rudy offers a startling account of how much it costs to be successful in some fields of academia.
09-01-2019
The Culture of Nationalism and the New Racism
By Roger BerkowitzEarlier this month at the National Conservative Conference multiple speakers sought to promote a “new American and British nationalism.” There was an effort to describe a nationalism grounded in strong national borders, and the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.” Also held up as the roots of American nationalism were constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.
08-27-2019
What We're Reading: How to Save the Amazon
By Roger BerkowitzRoberto Mangabeira Unger writes that lectures and stern words will do little to save the Brazilian Rain Forest. There are 30 million people living in the Amazon, Unger reminds us, and we “need to ensure that the forest is worth more standing than cut down. To that end, we must give the inhabitants of the Amazon the means to both use and preserve their environment.” Above all, what is needed is ways to make the people living in the Amazon aware of its worth to them.
08-27-2019
Sexism in Academia & Bureaucracy
By Samantha HillAs a new semester approaches, Troy Vettese chronicles Sexism in the Academy. Littered with statistics about the ways in which academic structures, like teaching evaluations, halt the upward mobility of female academics, Vettese paints a bleak picture: There are two tenured men for every tenured woman. The proportion of black women among tenured faculty has fallen since 1993.
08-27-2019
What We're Reading: Wealth Gap
By Samantha HillAre we living in a new gilded age? Two pieces this week address the tyranny of wealth and celebrity “culture.” In the American Affairs Journal, John Pierpont Morgan, compares two moments of economic crisis, thinking about whether or not inequality is good for capitalism. The wealth-gap, he writes, is self-reinforcing.
08-27-2019
What We're Reading:
The Spirit of Free Speech
By Roger BerkowitzJason Richwine takes on the argument that free speech only applies to the government regulation of speech. Of course, legally it is true that only the Constitution only protects speech from governmental restraint. But Richwine rightly argues that there the culture of engagement requires a broader protection of free speech.
08-24-2019
What we are Reading: Black Americans
By Roger BerkowitzNikole Hannah-Jones is well aware that she is “part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship.” She writes that while “Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50.” And she believes that “in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination...
08-19-2019
The American Algerians
By Roger BerkowitzIt is well known that Richard Wright found in Paris the freedom he never found as a black man in America. Maybe less well known is that that James Baldwin, in his essay, “Alas, Poor Richard,” accused Wright, as Adam Shatz observes, “of celebrating Paris as a “city of refuge” while remaining silent about France’s oppressive treatment of its colonial subjects.”
08-19-2019