Amor Mundi

Existentialism 

Samantha Hill
Carmen Lea Dege writes about the resurgence of interest in existentialism amidst the Covid crisis. Tracing the history of existentialism in the 20thcentury, Dege looks at Hannah Arendt’s two essays on the problems of German and French existentialism while thinking about how Heidegger and Jaspers influenced her understanding of evil..

Our Mob Moment

Roger Berkowitz
Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by three police officers as he was reaching into his car with his three children in the back seat. All cautionary rhetoric aside—we don't know the full story, he may have been reaching for a weapon, he was clearly not listening to the police—one fact is not in dispute to anyone watching the video of the attempted murder: Jacob Blake did not deserve to be shot seven times from behind and paralyzed. 

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard: Challenging Us as Political Beings in the World

“Academia, stuffy lectures, silos of thought, ivory towers—these visions of scholarly pursuits are not the pillars of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. In contrast, the Center dedicates itself to open, bold and diverse thinking, active questioning, and deepening an understanding of our collective political lives,” writes Mary B. O’Neill in this spotlight on the Center for Main Street magazine.

Facebook’s Holocaust Alogrithms

Roger Berkowitz

Politics and truth, Hannah Arendt reminds us, have never been on good terms. "Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade." And yet, Arendt raises the question of "what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth."

When Joe Biden Wrote to Hannah Arendt

Roger Berkowitz
On May 28, 1975, then Senator Joe Biden wrote a letter to Hannah Arendt. 
Dear Miss Arendt, I read in a recent article by Tom Wicker of a paper that you read at the Boston Bicentennial Forum. As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, I am most interested in receiving a copy of your paper. Thank you. Sincerely, Joseph R. Biden Jr. United State Senator. 

 

The Canceling of Adolph Reed

Roger Berkowitz

Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.

Seeing What Is: “White Privilege,” “Antiracism,” The Police – Lessons from a Losing Culture on the Authority of Language at a time of Movement

Nikita Nelin
“We got engaged, preparing for a summer wedding, and started talking about kids. Then the pandemic hit. My industry crumbled and hers pressurized. Social distancing left us sheltered in place in our new neighborhood, as we watched the world outside first shudder, and then take to the streets, while we tried to reconcile our place in it with the disappearance our own dream.”

The Call of the Wild

Roger Berkowitz
In the 1950s, the Dutch drained an area of wetland and a new province called Flevoland rose up from the sea. Part of that province witnessed the emergence of a wetland ecosystem and an ecologist Frans Vera sought to turn the nearly 15,000 acres into an experiment in bringing back a wild world. This area is called Oostvaardersplassen, or OVP, and it is the center of a battle over the idea of “rewilding,” a term that means to “limit the human empire” in the so-called Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch that begins with human activity’s first significant impacts on the planet.”

A Spray of Good News

Roger Berkowitz
The ingenuity of scientists who have developed dozens of vaccines that may be ready in late 2020 or early 2021 is now matched by a group of scientists at UCSF who have developed a potential way to stop the spread of Covid-19 through aerosolized nanobodies inspired by llamas.