NB: Anyone concerned about the intellectual health of their country should recall what Mao’s regime did to China’s academic life under the so-called Cultural Revolution in the late 1960’s. This was Mao Zedong’s motivated assault on academics, intellectuals and on his critics in the Communist Party leadership. Professor Frank Dikotter’s research study of this momentous… Read More Where Are the ‘Don Quixotes’ of Indian Academia?
We look for loneliness inside our heads when its source lies all around us, in the destruction of collective life, the erosion of communal bonds, the ruin of civil society, the squeezing of public spaces. Kenan Malik ‘The hope that political action will gradually humanise industrial society has given way to a determination to survive… Read More We think loneliness is in our heads, but its source lies in the ruin of civil society
What happened to the 21st-century city? Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives – BY RENE BOER this sadness is felt by so many people who find a place for themselves in a city and who know what it means to see their spaces of security, community, and openness taken away in exchange for more… Read More A Seamless Dystopia
The infantilizing social control of the university. Rita Koganzon When I was a graduate teaching assistant at Harvard University a decade ago, one of my students missed a final exam because he forgot to set his alarm. I didn’t learn about this because he told me, in person or even by email; nor did he… Read More The Coddling of the American Undergraduate
Amy Hawkins At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common. But in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valour in cyberspace. Last month a patriotic blogger… Read More China Nobel Laureate for literature becomes a target in nationalist slander campaign
Averroes (Ibn Rushd; 1126–1198) was one of the greatest polymaths of the ancient Islamic world, whose practice expanded into philosophy, theology, astronomy, physics, linguistics and more Averroism’, ‘radical Aristotelianism’ and ‘heterodox Aristotelianism’ are nineteenth- and twentieth-century labels for a late thirteenth-century movement among Parisian philosophers whose views were not easily reconcilable with Christian doctrine. The… Read More Who Was Averroes?
The French political philosopher was both mouthpiece and model for the best defense of liberalism. Paul T. Wilford, Ethan Cutler March 01, 2024 NB: The final paragraph of this review contains these lines: ‘As Mark Lilla notes in his preface to Aron’s lecture, the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine may be a wake-up call: “Sometimes it… Read More Raymond Aron’s Liberal Virtues
Real intelligence requires critical thinking and causal reasoning. LLMs cannot acquire these skills by finding statistical patterns in words they don’t understand. By Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk It has been almost 70 years since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined at a 1956 Dartmouth College summer workshop. The conference was convened by the mathematician… Read More When It Comes to Critical Thinking, AI Flunks the Test
By AMANDA MARCOTTE Despite the best efforts of the Beltway press to present him as a spry young man next to 81-year-old Joe Biden, it’s getting harder by the day to ignore that 77-year-old Donald Trump is decompensating rapidly. He wasn’t all that healthy or coherent to begin with but, lately, watching him speak has the… Read More Trump is degenerating before our eyes — MAGA voters don’t notice or don’t care
By Gregory Freidin Great musicians, it is said, do not choose their calling—music chooses them. Reading and rereading Joseph Frank’s writings after his passing, it seems that the spirit of modernity itself chose him to be its voice among literary critics—in the age when brute force remaking the world was matched and animated by a… Read More A Critic, His Life, His Age: A Tribute to Joseph Frank (1918-2013)
After the truth-shower 