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Temptations of Tyranny
Rod Dreher’s conflicted support for President Trump illustrates a broader crisis among intellectual conservatives who fear the "soft totalitarianism" of liberal institutions yet embrace the hard authoritarianism of executive overreach. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, the essay contends that true freedom is preserved not through charismatic leaders but through the multiplication and decentralization of citizen power. Revitalizing democracy, it argues, requires stubborn, local acts of collective governance rather than the dangerous temptation to concentrate authority in a single figure.04-27-2025
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A Symposium: Reimagining Human Health: The Microbiome, Farming, and Medicine.
Hua Wang, Professor in Department of Food Science and Technology, Microbiology, and Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Human Nutrition (OSUN) at the Ohio State University, talks about the overuse of antibiotics and the health of the human microbiome in anticipation of the Symposium at Bard, September 19th and 20th.09-03-2019
What We're Reading
By Samantha HillMike Jay writes about Walter Benjamin and Intoxication and Kathryn M. Rudy offers a startling account of how much it costs to be successful in some fields of academia.
09-01-2019
Why Tell a Story?
By Nikita NelinReading Arendt has caused me to consider the generative quality of my own work. All too often I find myself swinging from the narratives of hope to the voice of alarm and despair. From week to week my voice will vacillate between historically informed caution and a pragmatic optimism, which feels to be bordering on faith. Only loosely depending on the news of the day I am either warning people against the reactionary spirit that rises out of labeling our current...
08-30-2019
A Higher Understanding of Freedom
This essay was first published April 25, 2016.By Richard A. Barrett
Politicians, despite their divergent views and their distaste for each other, share at least this common ground: they believe in the vigorous pursuit and defense of freedom. In campaign speeches and party platforms freedom is one of the most frequently used terms. Freedom is set forth as a goal, as something that goes hand and hand with democracy.
08-27-2019
The Culture of Nationalism and the New Racism
By Roger BerkowitzEarlier this month at the National Conservative Conference multiple speakers sought to promote a “new American and British nationalism.” There was an effort to describe a nationalism grounded in strong national borders, and the superiority of “Anglo-Protestant culture.” Also held up as the roots of American nationalism were constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.
08-27-2019
What We're Reading: How to Save the Amazon
By Roger BerkowitzRoberto Mangabeira Unger writes that lectures and stern words will do little to save the Brazilian Rain Forest. There are 30 million people living in the Amazon, Unger reminds us, and we “need to ensure that the forest is worth more standing than cut down. To that end, we must give the inhabitants of the Amazon the means to both use and preserve their environment.” Above all, what is needed is ways to make the people living in the Amazon aware of its worth to them.
08-27-2019
Sexism in Academia & Bureaucracy
By Samantha HillAs a new semester approaches, Troy Vettese chronicles Sexism in the Academy. Littered with statistics about the ways in which academic structures, like teaching evaluations, halt the upward mobility of female academics, Vettese paints a bleak picture: There are two tenured men for every tenured woman. The proportion of black women among tenured faculty has fallen since 1993.
08-27-2019
What We're Reading: Wealth Gap
By Samantha HillAre we living in a new gilded age? Two pieces this week address the tyranny of wealth and celebrity “culture.” In the American Affairs Journal, John Pierpont Morgan, compares two moments of economic crisis, thinking about whether or not inequality is good for capitalism. The wealth-gap, he writes, is self-reinforcing.
08-27-2019
What We're Reading:
The Spirit of Free Speech
By Roger BerkowitzJason Richwine takes on the argument that free speech only applies to the government regulation of speech. Of course, legally it is true that only the Constitution only protects speech from governmental restraint. But Richwine rightly argues that there the culture of engagement requires a broader protection of free speech.
08-24-2019