What We're Readings
Featured Article
Impartiality and Objectivity
In Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt explores the critical distinction between impartiality and objectivity, emphasizing the necessity of understanding multiple perspectives in both art and politics. Through her essays, Arendt reflects on how the dual totalitarian regimes and the Holocaust necessitate a reevaluation of our moral and political traditions, urging us to cultivate the practice of thinking without the constraints of historical norms. This book serves as an essential guide for navigating contemporary political discourse, advocating for a return to impartial judgment as a means of fostering a shared world amidst diversity.09-22-2024
What We're Readings
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
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.06-10-2021
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.05-14-2021