Amor Mundi

What we are watching: The Closer

Roger Berkowitz
This week I screened Dave Chappelle’s The Closer for some of my students. It was optional. But I was heartened that they were eager to see the Netflix special that has generated so much controversy.

What we will be watching: Speer Goes to Hollywood

Join us for a live screening of the documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, on Friday, October 29th at 7 pm. Roger Berkowitz will be leading a Q&A session with Vanessa Lapa and Tomer Eliav about the documentary about "Hitler's Architect" 

On the Removal of Bright Sheng

Roger Berkowitz
Professor Bright Sheng showed a movie of Othello in his music composition class at the University of Michigan. Because Laurence Olivier appears in blackface in the movie, students called for his removal and colleagues denounced him.

Totalitarian Domination Today

Roger Berkowitz
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has issued a report “The Architecture of Repression: Unpacking Xinjiang's Governance.” What is going on in Xinjiang is the closest thing to a totalitarian movement in power that we see now in the world.

Revitalizing American Democracy

Roger Berkowitz
On Hannah Arendt’s 115th birthday on October 14th, the Hannah Arendt Center convened its Annual Fall Conference, Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom. The effort was to explore the movement for citizen assemblies from a wide plurality of perspectives from activists, artists, public intellectuals, business persons, and students. Watch a recording of the webcast here.

MIT Disinvites a Geophysicist

Roger Berkowitz
As Amor Mundi Readers know, I am a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. This week the Alliance sent a letter to MIT protesting the disinvitation of University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot. Professor Abbot had been invited to give a prestigious lecture in his specialty field of climate and planetary science.

The Meaning in Supporting Trump

Roger Berkowitz
Thomas B. Edsall looks at three in-depth voter surveys to ask why some people continue to support Donald Trump and still believe he won the last election.

The Civil Courage Prize

Roger Berkowitz
Eric Ward has been awarded the 2021 Civil Courage Prize, given by the Train Foundation. Ward is the first U.S. Recipient of the Civil Courage Prize. You can watch Ward’s talk at the 2019 Arendt Center Conference here.

The Insurrectionists 

Roger Berkowitz
A new study by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) has some startling conclusions. Twenty One Million Americans or 8.1% of the population—more than one quarter of all adults—are “insurrectionists” who believe that the last election was stolen.  Sixty three percent of Americans believe that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.”