Misrepresentation and Misrecognition
Steve King’s American Exceptionalism and its Ties to the “Slaves were Immigrants, too” Thesis
The Women’s Strike, Anti-Semitism, and Robots
Past Present Episode 73
In this week’s episode, Natalia, Neil, and Niki debate the complicated politics of the women’s strike, the rise of anti-Semitism in America, and humanity’s relationship to robots.
Of Honor and Despair in Dark Times
Hannah Arendt on Stefan Zweig
In 1943, with confirmation of the Nazis’ implementation of what the ossified bureaucratic language called Endlösung (the final solution) — the extermination of all European Jews — Hannah Arendt published an essay in the émigré journal Aufbau (printed in New York) on Stefan Zweig and the bygone world of yesterday, namely the world of dreams and illusions of German culture’s bourgeois cosmopolitanism. As one of its most influential and admired voices …
Agnes Heller and “Everyday Revolutions”
Portrait of a Philosopher
The forms of the southern clouds at the dawn of April 30th, 1882, are comparable to those mottled streaks on this one book he had only seen once (a Spanish edition). Following the Naturalis Historia, he recounts exactly four historically exemplary cases of prodigious memory: Cyrus …
Why Iran is Afraid of Daniel Barenboim
Dischords instead of overtures
No Art of the Fugue in the land of a thousand centrifuges: Iran has informed Daniel Barenboim that his intended concert with the Berlin orchestra in Tehran has been cancelled. There will be no overture during the long-anticipated easing following the nuclear deal. This is a blow for Barenboim as well as for Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, who was meant to be the patron of the concert.
The official explanation is interesting …