Amor Mundi

Doubters and Skeptics

Roger Berkowitz
Sebastian Veg, who writes about China, has published his introduction to the Thai translation of Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.”

Managing the Shock

Roger Berkowitz
The apparent murder of Tyre Nichols by five Memphis police officers has once again thrust the issue of racialized policing into the spotlight. Juliette Kayyem argues that “because of the sheer number of times Americans have now confronted videos of police officers killing Black citizens, public officials have gotten better at managing the shock.”

Love and Hate at the Movies

Roger Berkowitz
Wyatt Mason revisits the 1987 action movie Predator and finds, to his horror, that it is a masterpiece and that he, in spite of himself, loves action movies. Amidst a tour de force romp through the history and structure of action movies and a romp through his personal history as a failed script writer, Mason reflects on the role of violence in film.

Failing Institutions of Democracy

Roger Berkowitz
Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, offers a deep dive into the specific Brazilian background to the riots where “supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace, killing nobody but causing substantial property damage.”

New Opportunities for Creativity

Roger Berkowitz
While on vacation in Rome with his wife, the writer Hanif Kureishi collapsed. While in a small public hospital outside of the city, he has been dictating a blog chronicling his medical situation along with side thoughts about the world. In one of the first posts, a nurse asks him, “How long did it take you to write ‘Midnight’s Children?’” She has confused him with his friend Salman Rushdie. Kureishi wrote. “I replied, ‘If I had indeed written ‘Midnight’s Children,’ don’t you think I would have gone private?” Kureishi’s blog has become widely popular, for good reason.

The Attack on Academic Thinking  

Roger Berkowitz
Len Gutkin tells of the egregious abrogation of academic freedom and intellectual integrity at Hamline University, where a art-history professor was fired for teaching about a medieval image of the prophet Muhammad.

All Academic Thinking is Conservative

Roger Berkowitz
Jordi Graupera met Richard Bernstein when Graupera was a Ph.D. student at the New School in 2008. Last year, Graupera asked Bernstein to audit his final seminar on Hannah Arendt. Graupera’s account of that final class and his tribute to his teacher are well worth reading. So too is his retelling of Bernstein’s story of how he first met Arendt. 

Your Silence Will Not Protect You

Roger Berkowitz
Clem Cecil translates the speech by the Russian Poet and editor Alla Gutnikova at her trial at which she was accused and convicted of “encouraging minors to take part in demonstrations in support of Alexei Navalny last spring.”

The Gift of Dangerous Thinking