Featured
Featured Article
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
Featured
Does Harvard Discriminate Against Asians?
Roger BerkowitzJay Caspian Kang believes in affirmative action and racial preferences. But when he dives into the Harvard case coming to the Supreme Court, Kang argues that Harvard’s approach to affirmative action reveals “a profoundly broken system that relies on obfuscation and misdirection, especially when it comes to the treatment of Asian applicants.”
01-30-2022
Academic Politics
Roger BerkowitzMatt Beard reflects on the academic politics of the early 20th century- and the ideas of Weber and Arendt- in order to draw lessons for our own time, in which politics is infringing on questions of academic integrity.
01-22-2022
The Classics for All
Roger BerkowitzWhen Roosevelt Montas immigrated to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic, he found a copy of Plato’s Dialogues in a garbage dump and took it home. It changed his life. Thomas Chatterton Williams writes on the importance of the classics for the underprivileged.
01-16-2022
Gullibility and Cynicism
Roger BerkowitzRebecca Solnit asks why Republican voters keep believing the lies about the election told by Donald Trump. And to answer that question she turns to Hannah Arendt.
01-09-2022
Join us for another year of risky thinking...
A Letter from Roger Berkowitz asking for your support12-17-2021
Between Languages
Roger BerkowitzWhen asked by Günter Gaus what was irretrievably lost when she had to flee the Nazis and leave Germany and Europe behind, Hannah Arendt answered: “The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell you. What remains? The language remains.” In a profile of the writer Lydia Davis, Wyatt Mason dives into this question of how knowing many languages changes and enriches a writer.
12-10-2021
Thinking is Out of Order
Roger BerkowitzIn her last book The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt writes that “thinking is out of order.” Thinking frees us from the world of appearances and allows us to think things beyond our common sense that we share with others. In this way, thinking is not about the pursuit of truth but it is, Arendt argues, about the pursuit of meaning. Thomas Bartscherer meditates on Arendt’s characterization of thinking as out of order.
12-03-2021
The Soul Lit Suddenly From Within
Roger Berkowitz
Wyatt Mason writes about translating poetry and specifically Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Amidst long ruminations on Baudelaire’s rhythmic syllables, Mason highlights the poet’s fight against all that is common.
11-26-2021
A Failure of Leadership
Roger BerkowitzThere may be no more dangerous trend in higher education than the epidemic of administrators. For over ten years we’ve been reading articles about administrative bloat—spending on administration now nearly equals spending on faculty at many major universities. Philip Mousavizadeh writes about the “proliferation of administrators” at Yale University, where in the last 20 years “the number of managerial and professional staff... has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body.”
11-19-2021