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When We Choose Knaves
The Alien and Enemies Act gives the President nearly unfettered power to expel non-citizens in times of war and the Supreme Court has given the President great leeway to determine what is and what is not a war. What we are witnessing is less a constitutional crisis than a cold and cruel manipulation of existing laws to stoke fear that is shocking to our humanist sensibilities. 03-23-2025
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From Data to Data, Without the Theory
Roger BerkowitzHannah Arendt was skeptical of social science theories. Theorists, or problem solvers as she often referred to them, are people of “great self-confidence.” They are confident in the education and intelligence and they “pride[] themselves on ‘rational.’” Dedicated to rationality, they “were indeed to a rather frightening degree above ‘sentimentality’ and in love with ‘theory...'"
02-18-2021
An Asia-African World Block
There have been many devastating pandemics in the past. Each time people managed to pull through them and take stock of things, they found their world completely transformed. After this pandemic, are we going to be confronted with a similarly strange new world? Quite possibly. Those from the right like Henry Kissinger to leftists like Slavoj Žižek have been making prognostic statements and there have been all sorts of assessments of the situation...02-18-2021
Seyla Benhabib on “Tradition and the Modern Age”
As part of the “On Hannah Arendt” year-long art exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery in London, Seyla Benhabib joined Roger Berkowitz in a discussion of Arendt’s essay “Tradition and the Modern Age.” Moving from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, Benhabib shed light on Arendt’s claim that Karl Marx represents the end of the western tradition of political thought.02-11-2021
Play
Roger BerkowitzSusanna Crossman reflects on the power of play. “Play is a powerful motor.” Play involves a “leap in the dark” and requires trust. Play, the thinker Eugen Fink writes, “unites ‘the highest desire and the deepest suffering’.” Play is thus deeply connected to the very human way of being alive, something we can hear in its etymologies, many of which go back to the Latin ludere. “Ludere in Latin refers to leaping fishes and fluttering birds. The Anglo-Saxon lâcan means to move like a ship on the waves, or to tremble like a flame.
02-11-2021
Firings and Prosecutions This Week
Roger BerkowitzIn what seems a fairly usual occurrence, two journalists and two professors were fired or prosecuted this week for running afoul of mainstream opinions or, in Poland, legally prohibited opinions. John McWhorter argues that firing a New York Times reporter for using the N-word to refer to the N-word and not as a slur obfuscates the difference between a slur and a taboo. Ben Cohen reports on the prosecution of Professors Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski in Poland.
02-11-2021
Arendt, Brecht, and Bowie
Last week Roger Berkowitz inaugurated the reading of The Human Condition in the Virtual Reading Group (amidst a record 185 attendees) with a short lecture about Arendt’s addition of an epigraph by Bertolt Brecht to the Prologue of the German edition of the Vita Activa. The epigraph consists of the first and last paragraphs of Brecht’s opening hymn to his play Baal.02-11-2021
Old Letters From Loved Ones
Jacob RiversThe latest issue of Poetry Magazine, guested edited by poets Tara Betts and Joshua Bennett, focuses on work written by currently and formerly incarcerated poets, bringing a systematically suppressed chorus of voices to the forefront of the poetry community’s publishing landscape. Editor Tara Betts writes in her introduction to the issue, “The contributors, who are often no longer perceived as people in the non-incarcerated world, are indeed human.
02-04-2021
The QAnon Conspiracy is Still Here
Politics is about opinion not truth. This is one of Hannah Arendt’s central insights. At the same time, however, every political community must have some truths that it shares, that it holds in common, that unites it as a collective political body. These truths are not “objective,” but they are shared stories and ideals that form, in Arendt’s words, “the ground on which we stand and teh sky that stretches above us.”02-04-2021
Seeing the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province
Matthew Hill, David Campanale, and Joel Gunter report on first hand accounts coming out of the horrific camps where Uighur’s are being tortured, raped, and dehumanized in China. We need to stop calling the camps run by the Chinese government in Zinjiang province internment, concentration, or re-education camps. They are rather genocidal camps for torture and rape.02-04-2021