What We're Readings
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Arendt as an Epistolary Friend
Madeleine Thien reads Hannah Arendt’s correspondence and finds that they add to her depth as a thinker.03-27-2022
What We're Readings
Socrates and the Culture Wars
Roger BerkowitzPeter Minowitz writes about how teaching Socrates’ Apology can push us past the binaries of our culture wars.
01-30-2022
Final Account
Jody Bolton-Fasman reviews Luke Holland’s new documentary “Final Account.”09-30-2021
The Humanities Must Argue for Themselves
Len Gutkin interviews Bard College President Leon Botstein about liberal arts, political repression and the humanities. Here, Botstein responds to the crisis of the humanities.09-09-2021
College Hierarchies
Mitchell L. Stevens argues that despite the “enduring faith that a college education creates opportunity for rising up social ranks,” empirical evidence suggests that at least some college degrees may actually reinforce social and economic stratification.08-20-2021
VIDEO: Crisis in Education
As part of the Richard Saltoun’s Gallery’s reading group around its Exhibit “On Hannah Arendt,” Roger Berkowitz hosted a conversation with Griselda Pollock on Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Education”08-20-2021
Against Bad Ideas
Glenn Loury writes the inaugural essay in the newly launched Journal of Free Black Thought:08-06-2021
A Failure of Leadership
Nikole Hannah-Jones has published a letter explaining her decision to first fight to get tenure as the Knight Chair Professor at the University of North Carolina and then her decision to decline the offer and take a new chair at Howard University.07-09-2021
The Imagination Police
Barbara J. Zitwer writes about the importance of imagination, something she argues is threatened by an “imagination police” rules against cultural appropriation.07-09-2021
Laughter as a Kind of Common Sense
In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt revisits Plato’s Thracian servant girl, suggesting that her laughter is the laughter of innocence. There is no hint, here, that the Thracian girl’s response involves the hostility of ridicule. Of course, Arendt’s project can be thought in terms of a kind of identification with the Thracian girl’s worldly perspective, and writers such as Jacques Taminiaux have explored this association and its important implications...06-25-2021