Writers created “Western” civilization out of a looming sense that it was in peril. This is as true today as it was a century ago, when Oswald Spengler published the first volume of The Decline of ...
Tag: Democracy
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...
Public Thinker: Timothy Snyder on Russia and “Dark Globalization”
Timothy Snyder has taken a region that resists understanding and made it ...
Focus Groups and Voting Booths
What can we know of our fellow citizens? The question is at root philosophical or epistemological. In the peculiar climate fostered by the Trump regime, however ...
The Invention of the “White Working Class”
As liberals came to terms with what happened on Election Day 2016, early press reports focused on the so-called white working class. We’d seen these ...
The Big Picture: Trump’s Attack on Knowledge
On any particular policy, we can always hope President Trump will flip-flop. Expel the Dreamers; save the Dreamers. Maybe he’ll keep the US in the Paris climate accords after all. Threaten Kim Jong ...
The Big Picture: Religion and the Republic
I still remember reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time, as a freshman in college. I was astonished! How could this French aristocrat have understood us so well, I wondered ...
The Big Picture: Trump on Twitter
On its face, Twitter appears to be a quintessentially democratic medium. It promotes individualized expression, helps build social networks, and, until recently, seemed to epitomize the decentralized ...
The Constitution: When Less Is More
If music is the space between the notes, the United States Constitution is a magnum opus of silence. At about 4,500 words, it’s pretty slim, and there’s a lot you’d expect to see in a foundational ...
The Big Picture
This public symposium is a collective effort to assess the rise of Trump and the impact of America’s unsettling turn toward authoritarian rule. It’s a call for us to pull back from the deluge of tweets …
Populism, Right and Left
It says a lot about the mood among liberal commentators that George W. Bush is currently being remade into a kind of quaint grandee of American politics. Even Bernie Sanders, a staunch opponent of ...
How Oligarchy Breeds Tyranny
The last 18 months have seen a surge of public interest in classical texts. In Plato’s dialogue the Republic, readers have found an almost perfect sketch of Donald ...
The Yurt of Fiction
This summer, George Saunders wrote that Donald Trump had given him a gift. Saunders had been traveling across the country, attending Trump rallies ...
Cuba’s Next Chapter
In April 2016, Cuba’s Communist Party (PCC) convened its Seventh Party Congress. Sprinkled throughout the published proceedings were a few attempts at levity by the otherwise laconic Raúl Castro. One ...
We Didn’t Have Politicians Up to the Task: A Conversation with Kanan Makiya
As the Iraqi Army and coalition forces, supported by US airstrikes, enter the third week of a campaign ...
Against Despair
Despair is everywhere, and for good reason. Huge numbers of refugees are fleeing warfare and violence, while unceasing terrorist attacks are feeding the right-wing populist surge all across Europe ...
Bro Uprising
With Pierce Brown’s lately concluded Red Rising trilogy, the phenomenon of the blockbuster Young Adult dystopian novel that brought us The Hunger Games and Divergent has reached its eye-popping ...
Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this ...
Beyond the Bubble
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. In 2002, a year after Amartya Sen’s well-known essay on hunger, “Old Torments and New Blunders,” was first published, I travelled through ...
“Democracy and Education” at 100
The rallies during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign feature exuberant call-and-response exchanges. Denouncing immigrants from south of the border, Trump shouts, “We’re going to build a wall ...