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A Civil Town Hall Dialog with a Trump Supporter
I was just listening to a the Daily Podcast from the NYT. I followed a Michigan congresswoman Elissa Slotkin to town halls she held in her district to talk about the Trump impeachment. I thought she was pretty good, but as I was listening, I was wondering to myself how I would have handled some
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Quote of the Day: Gary Lachman
The Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist Francis Crick (1916–2004) – co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule – wrote that ‘you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and
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On Simone Weil
Weil's essays are bristling with insights, and there is both a sophistication and a naivete about the way she writes about them. She's not attempting to justify herself to anyone; she's not attempting to fit into some school. There is a raw energy in what she writes, and those who are drawn to her would
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Quote of the Day: Patrick Deneen
Part of moving toward a post liberal age is recognizing that while liberalism's initial appeal was premised upon laudatory aspirations, its successes have often been based on a disfigurement of those aspirations. . . . Today we consider the paramount sign of the liberation of women to be their growing emancipation from their biology, which
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Stay Human 2
This article by James Poulos–"McLuhanomics: The Medium versus the Market" in American Affairs is worth taking a look at. Short excerpt: Instead of making what McLuhan called “the global village” into a harmonious, happy, liberated place—freed of all mind controllers by the universal operating system of unplanned order—digital technology did what many now recognize as the opposite. From former
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Message to Millennials
I taught a course this past Winter in the Honors Program where I teach I entitled Human/Transhuman/Posthuman. I wrote a post in its last week to summarize what I hoped to have achieved in teaching it. I thought it might provide something of a counterbalance to the rather pessimistic tenor of my most recent posts.
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Quote of the Day: Adam Tooze on Runciman’s ‘How Democracy Ends’
From the NYRB It is tempting to say that his book makes the perfect antidote both to the superheated American national debate and the certainty of Snyder’s dark narrative. Yet this should not obscure the quiet prophecy in Runciman’s own account. It can be traced to his innocent-sounding quip that repeated references to the 1930s
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Mueller, Trump, and the Russians
I think that my take in my earlier post about the Mueller/Barr Report was mostly right. If anything I'm persuaded that things are worse for Trump than I thought then. I think it's clear that Barr is more of a partisan hack than many, including me, thought at the time. I still find it hard
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Fantasy, Projection, and Reality in the Age of Trump, Part II
As with many of my posts, "Fantasy, Projection, and Reality in the Age of Trump, Part I" is one in which I'm mostly thinking out loud about a problem in the hopes of resolving it. The problem in this case was to reconcile what I believe is important about what psychoanalytical thought tells us about repression