“We live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal”, wrote James Baldwin in his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis”. The year was 1970. I wonder if there has ever been a time when silence was neither criminal nor suicidal. I would like to live there and then, for […]
Academia
The prestigious university is resisting demands for fair treatment from casualised staff, despite its vast wealth
Until last Friday, I subscribed to two newspapers: the Washington Post and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As of Friday, I only subscribe to NZZ. I shared my cancellation on Facebook and was surprised by how many people in my network commented that they had done the same. This included people who almost never comment or […]
The idea of the gold rush is deeply rooted in the American psyche. “There’s gold in them thar hills.” Anyone can abandon his family and community to gamble big on themselves. Thanks to this rugged individualism and the natural bounty of our territory, there’s a chance that you can strike it rich. More than American, […]
There’s not much I can do about it, but I still spend a lot of time thinking about what I, and others outside the US, should do if that country ceases to be a democracy. But, it doesn’t seem as if lots of other people are thinking this way. One possibility is that people just […]
Before Rawls’ shadow in left-liberal political philosophy there was Arnold S. Kaufman (1927-1971), who died when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling (recall this post). While there is no Wikipedia page devoted to him, Kaufman was rather famous during the 1960s because of his involvement with the student movement at the University […]
There are many processes now subsumed under the term “Artificial Intelligence.” The reason we’re talking about it now, though, is that the websites are doing things we never thought websites could do. The pixels of our devices light up like never before. Techno-optimists believe that we’re nowhere close to the limit, that websites will continue […]
We’re in another round of concern about the “death of the book”, and, in particular, the claimed inability or unwillingness of young people to read full-length books. I’m not going to push too far on the argument that this complaint is ancient, but I can’t resist mentioning the response of my younger brother, who, when […]
At the Château of Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire.