What We're Readings

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. 

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...

The Deformed Appetites of Whiteness

If you want to understand why there is controversy around critical race theory, take a look at this abstract from a paper by Donald Moss that was published in the Journal of the American Pscyhoanalytic Association. 

The Strongmen

Ariel Dorfman reviews Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s The Strongmen  that offers a synoptic account of the dictators, fascists, and strongmen that emerged on the world stage in the 1920s and continue till today. Ben-Ghiat divides these Strongmen into three periods and seeks to discover their common thread. 

University of Toronto Censured

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has censured the University of Toronto for canceling the hiring of a professor because of complaints by a University Trustee about the professor’s politics.

Regulating Artificial Intelligence

The European Union has issued a “Proposal for a Regulation on  a European Approach for Artificial Intelligence.” Download it here. Sam Schechner and Parmy Olson write that “European officials want to limit police use of facial recognition and ban the use of certain kinds of AI systems, in one of the broadest efforts yet to regulate high-stakes applications of artificial intelligence.”

First Amendment on Campus

Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya found himself suspended and dismissed from the University of Virginia Medical School after he raised questions during a panel on microagressions. The case is now in the courts and Judge Norman K. Moon of the Western District of Virginia has allowed Bhattacharya’s freedom of speech suit to go forward. The opinion is well worth reading. 

The Classroom as Public Space

Scott Newstock turns to Shakespeare and Hannah Arendt to reflect on the loss of the classroom space over the last year. 

Arendt, Camus, and Comte

David Langwallner writes about Hannah Arendt as a public intellectual and highlights her connections with Albert Camus and their joint worry about the rising power of scientists in public life.