Articles

The First TikTok War

Tobias Hess
The recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia marks not just a seismic change in the global geopolitical order, but a historiographical shift in how citizens take in the documentation of war.

Russia Invades Ukraine

Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt wrote about war, genocide, and totalitarianism. Her mantra was to look reality squarely in the face and seek to understand it and to resist it. But first to understand it. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is a human tragedy. It is also a geopolitical earthquake that threatens to transform the world in which we live.

In Memoriam, P.J. O’Rourke

Roger Berkowitz
P.J. O’Rourke died this week. His satirical essays on American democracy are essential reading, including my favorite “At Home in the Parliament of Whores”—a send up of a local town hall meeting in the fictional town of Blaterboro, loosely based on O’Rourke’s home in New Hampshire.

Demographics Is Not Destiny

Roger Berkowitz
It is a widespread faith amongst many on the left that the coming majority minority population will lead to increasingly left-wing politics. Mickey Kaus offers 14 reasons why this is wrong and dangerous.

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.

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.

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."