Zuckerberg & Chan Are Us

Philanthrocapitalism and the public good

Almost forty-eight years to the day before Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced the creation of their limited liability company and pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares within their lifetimes, a lawyer lectured a roomful of stockbrokers on “How to Obtain Maximum Tax Advantages by Using Securities ...

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ISIS Slaughters, Iranians Get Punished

A threat to democratic efforts in Iran

Last Tuesday, December 8, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill, supported by the White House, which, if signed into law this week, would punish Iranians for crimes they have never committed. Moreover, it would provoke the hardliners in Iran, only a few months after ...

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Shakespeare and Trump: What’s in a Name?

Thoughts on headless bodies in tombless graves

One seeks in vain for references to Shakespeare in Carly Fiorina’s Tough Choices: A Memoir (2007) and Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey (2015). There are no lessons from Shakespeare in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach ...

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Islam and “the Sword”

Ross Douthat has an uncharacteristically ignorant post on Islam in yesterday’s New York Times. Douthat wants to contest the Trumpists in his own party that identify Islam with violence. He argues that there is a place for Islam in the modern world, as another religion, but -- he concludes -- “it has ...
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When will the Barred Owl of Minerva Fly?

Time is running out for Israel-Palestine

On a cold, dreary November morning in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, I finally understood why owls are seen as wise, why in the ancient world they represented Athena and Minerva, the goddesses of wisdom. On my way from an academic symposium in Great Barrington ...

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When will the Barred Owl of Minerva Fly?

Going Backward in Argentina

A country is not a corporation

The election of Mauricio Macri on November 22, 2015, to the presidency in Argentina by a slim 51% to 49% over Governor Daniel Scioli marks a sharp break with 12 years of progressive government and the reconstruction of the state after the neoliberal period of the 1990s. It is a ...

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Going Backward in Argentina

From OOO to P(OO)

I have been reading the work of Timothy Morton with pleasure for many years now. Originally a scholar of English romantic poetry, I find his work reads best as poetry, or perhaps a poetics, as a singular Mortonian vision of the world – or in this case, a vision of ...
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From OOO to P(OO)

Two Cheers for Prayer Shaming

My mentor at Fordham, the late Quentin Lauer, S.J., who helped introduce Husserl’s phenomenology to an American audience and was a Hegel scholar par excellence, liked to tell a story about his boyhood in Brooklyn, where he would go swimming off the docks adjacent to Upper New York bay with ...
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