What a Survivalist Reality TV Show Can Teach Us About the Human Condition
What makes 'Alone' endlessly fascinating and deeply moving is the mirror it holds up to our broken lives.
A collection of 123 posts
What makes 'Alone' endlessly fascinating and deeply moving is the mirror it holds up to our broken lives.
If 'The Strange Death of Europe' was a requiem for a stricken continent, 'War on the West' is intended to be an act of defiance.
Kirchick’s book is a reminder of a shameful past, but its very existence is also evidence of the progress that the West’s democracies have made in the years since.
Herf tells the complicated and often surprising story of the internal political struggles in Western capitals, as well as in the halls of the United Nations, that erupted at the end of the Second World War.
Hofstadter argued that McCarthyism was simply the latest iteration of a longstanding American tradition.
Williams, W. A. (1962). The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Dell Pub. Co. When the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) pinned Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine on NATO’s “imperialist expansionism,” many policymakers and journalists on both sides of the political spectrum lambasted the organization for its half-hearted
A review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti, Basic Books, 496 pages (April 2022) “So inevitable and yet so completely unforeseen” was Alexis de Tocqueville’s verdict on the French Revolution. Much the same can be said of Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of
A review of A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press, 288 pages (April 2022) As I write this, the city of Rotterdam is considering a request to dismantle one of its historic bridges to grant Jeff Bezos’s super-yacht (too monstrous for normal ports) safe passage to
A review of Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, edited by T. Allan Hillman and Tully Borland. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 320 pages (November, 2021) Dissident Philosophers, edited by T. Allan Hillman of the University of South Alabama and independent scholar Tully Borland, is a compilation
A review of The Identity Myth by David Swift. Constable, 320 pages (June 2022). In recent decades, anxieties afflicting Western democracies have arisen from new beliefs and conflicts about how citizens relate to each other—their relative status in society, notions of mutual respect, and the patterns that the past
A review of The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s by Ellen Schrecker. University of Chicago Press, 616 pages (December 2021). The 1960s were the tipping point of postwar American history at which the conservativism of the previous decade evolved into an era of growing liberal consensus. Historian James
In Shakespeare’s play, the Weïrd Sisters undoubtedly spur Macbeth toward evil by tempting him toward his dark ambition.
A review of Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts by Jed Perl. Knopf, 176 pages. (January, 2022) Plug “relevance” into the search field of the website for Artforum, and 16 results pop up from 2021 alone. Relevance is the dominant aesthetic criterion of our time, and lack thereof
AI only knows what is in the data. The unfortunate use of the term “learning” is a simple, but potent, source of confusion and apprehension.
A review of World in Danger: Germany and Europe in an Uncertain Time by Wolfgang Ischinger, Brookings, 280 pages (November, 2020) Every winter in Bavaria, the great and the good from Europe and the United States gather to take stock of the threats facing the world. The Munich Security Conference