Featured Article
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
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The Conservative Coates
By Roger BerkowitzWil S. Hylton interviews Paul Coates. Coates was a Black Panther Party leader in Baltimore in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He founded a prison literacy program, owned of a bookstore devoted to community service, and established the publishing company Black Classic Press to disseminate the work of...
04-18-2019
Tough Talk: They Mistook a Backlash for a Movement: Black Men and the Doom of Western Civilization
This talk was presented as a part of The Hannah Arendt Center's Tough Talk Lecture Series, organized by Bard student Mark Williams, Jr.. Introductions by Roger Berkowitz, Director and Founder of the Hannah Arendt Center, and Mark Williams, Jr.. Discussion moderated by Bard alum, Dana Miranda '14.04-17-2019
Left Totalitarianism?
By Roger BerkowitzI continually hope that the right-wing narrative about left-wing intolerance (and even left-wing totalitarianism) is overblown. As a professor at Bard College—a liberal arts college that welcomes and relishes difficult conversations—I hope that the trend of censoring right-wing views is overblown and a passing fad.
04-17-2019
Hate
By Roger BerkowitzI am a few years older than Matt Taibbi, but it turns out we both share an encounter with Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent as a formative experience in our encounter with worlds of politics and journalism.
04-17-2019
Fear of Fascism
By Samantha HillJacob Mikanowski profiles Timothy Snyder for The Chronicle Review. Snyder is a historian of the Holocaust and professor at Yale University. His new work, The Road to Unfreedom, chronicles the rise of authoritarianism today.
04-14-2019
The Microbiome
By Roger BerkowitzMatt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs report on one of the greatest threats to our way of life, the rise of bacteria and fungi that are impervious to medications. The culprit, as with so much in our modern health and environmental crises, is the overuse of antibiotics and antifungal medications in farming.
04-14-2019
Secrets and Sins
By Roger BerkowitzThe New York Times is running a series of articles on privacy called the Privacy Project. James Martin has an excellent essay on the double way that privacy is addressed in the Bible.
04-14-2019
Spotlight on The Campus Plurality Project
“Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.” —Hannah Arendt04-12-2019
Courage to Be Student Essay: Livy Marie Donahue on Deogratias Niyizonkiza
By Livy Marie DonahueDeogratias Niyizonkiza visited Bard College on March 4th, as the second speaker of the 2019
Courage to Be lecture series.
04-11-2019