At the end of last summer, Le Débat, France’s most prestigious intellectual review, accompanied its 40th-anniversary issue with a wholly unexpected announcement: It would cease publication forthwith. Le Débat and its three or four thousand loyal readers had maintained an allegiance to the political left since the Cold War — but the meaning of “left”… Read More Christopher Caldwell: Is This the End of French Intellectual Life?
As an American living in India, I often find myself confused about what to say or think in these sorts of situations. I can recognize that Rihanna probably has no context for the farmers’ protests, other than what she’s read online. Shit–I’ve spent half my life in India, and I’m still not as politically savvy… Read More Reflections of an American living in India…
It was the grown-ups’ turn for presents. Tradition was to do a swap-or-steal gift exchange. I watched as my brother-in-law, a usually mild-mannered man, picked a gift and then shook it at the camera in our direction, a taunting glint in his eye. I looked closer. Whoever had wrapped it had meticulously taped a $2020… Read More Shrestha Singh: I’m A First-Generation Indian American Woman. I Married Into A Family Of Trump Supporters
The USA’s failure to contain COVID-19 has been spectacular from every angle. Looked at as a case of mass non-adherence to medical advice, however, it’s unique in modern history. Never before have so many citizens had so much access to information and simultaneously protested public health recommendations with such full-throated denial of the medical facts.… Read More Austin Ratner & Nisarg Gandhi: Psychoanalysis in combatting mass non-adherence to medical advice
Martin Luther King Jr. understood that non-violence is never instinctual. It takes practice. After a year of boycotting the public bus system in Montgomery, King’s community was jubilant when the courts ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. But King knew the tremendous force it would take to withstand the inevitable acts of hatred and… Read More Jan Erkert: How to deal with trolls
MIND OF STATE, Episode 10: Justice, Rage & Peace Civil Rights Activist Eric Ward — Exec Director of the Western States Center and Senior Fellow of the Southern Poverty Law Center — was an inspiration to speak with on White Supremacy, White Nationalism, Authoritarianism and how we combat these threats to our democracy https://apple.co/2W9rDdH… Read More MIND OF STATE, Episode 10: Justice, Rage & Peace. By Civil Rights Activist Eric Ward
NB: A personal mini-memoir that is not only moving, but could make us think seriously about the significance of politics in private life; and the emotional investment involved in ideological thinking. It is important not only for Americans, but for people in different parts of the world whose inner lives have been transformed by their… Read More Richard L. Eldredge: To my family who chose Trump over me: Was it worth it?
Around 1905 or 1906, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay, unpublished in his lifetime, called “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage.” The essay addressed the question of what we, as spectators, get out of watching people go crazy. Freud’s theory was that we’re fascinated by crazy characters because they help us express our own repressed impulses. Drama,… Read More Book review: The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing
After the truth-shower 