Traumatized Heroes
Living with wrongdoing
Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....
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Social Research Introduces “Frontiers of Social Inquiry”
Animal politics, climate governance, and more
The Winter 2023 of Social Research, “Frontiers of Social Inquiry,” explores new and newly foregrounded areas of research and scholarship such as memory studies, inequality, race, and climate....
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Doll Power
Where do thoughts of death lead?
Barbie is forever denied the awkward self-consciousness that makes possible both ambition and disappointment. ...
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When Words Lose Their Meaning
When the terms used to describe key concepts go viral, they get used in new ways
A series of improperly priced terms are used in current political debate: capitalism, socialism, democracy, imperialism, multilateralism, geopolitics, populism, technocracy, globalism, globalization, and neoliberalism. They have become the standard munition that is fired between the sides in today’s culture, policy, and economic wars....
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Writing in Third Person
An excerpt from Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography
Historical narration had to be anonymous and the historian undetectable lest they make their presence known in any way. ...
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Bard, Kinetic
An excerpt from the preface of Anne Waldman’s new nonfiction book
Poetry has always braved shifting and terrifying frequencies. There is no time in human history without poetry. Poets often go into exile in fraught times....
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Docking the Long Tail of Culture
How mass culture has scored a decisive victory in the age of the Internet
In the past, the difficulty of acquiring long-tail content suggested that a person had many underlying status assets, such as intelligence, curiosity, and deep knowledge. When anyone can find anything obscure on the Internet within minutes, acquisition alone reveals no virtues or skills....
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“God Is Dead”
And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties
I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...
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What Does It Mean to Be “Authentic”?
Skye C. Cleary chats with Luis Jaramillo about her new book on Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy-from-life method
Finding your “authentic self” is often taken to mean: “Let’s turn inward and look for the blueprint that’s going to tell us what decisions we should make and that will make us happy.” But Beauvoir argued that we’re humans who are always growing, always changing....
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Why Christianity and the Fate of American Democracy Are Intertwined
An interview with intellectual historian David Hollinger
We're now confronted with a remarkable paradox. Our increasingly secular society is saddled with increasingly religious politics. Religion is ever-more prominent in Supreme Court decisions and in the statements that candidates for political office make. Politics are not only more religious, they are more Christian. ...
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Good Jewish Boys Gone Bad
Did the sexual monstrosity of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have cultural roots?
Harvey Weinstein—like Jeffrey Epstein—was the product not of a liberated sexuality gone haywire but of a liberated sexuality that passed them by when it mattered most. ...
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When I Was One-Dimensional
How Herbert Marcuse’s text changed my life
"For their sincere reception," Cavell concludes, some life-altering texts require "the shock of conversion." Reading Marcuse, I had felt that shock, with pleasure. Few experiences are quite as rapturous as the conviction that one has embarked on a splendid new life with the firmest of good convictions: as Plato long ...
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