Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize
It’s been a weird year (the weirdest I can remember at least), and Thursday morning’s announcement that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature made it weirder still. But, overall, it is weird in a welcome way.
Pre-announcement speculation centered on the possibility that the prize might be awarded to an ...
Ordinary Uncanniness: The Early Photographs of Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, an exhibition at The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10021, July 12 through November 27, 2016
Like the painter Francis Bacon and the illustrator Ralph Steadman, Diane Arbus’s photographic art has often been associated with the grotesque, the disconcerting, the alien. Her haunting ...
Noam Chomsky, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Ethics of Voting
Patriotism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism
Walking the Walk: a Plea to Fellow Sanders Supporters
The Grand Ah-whoom: Reflections on Trump and Trumpism Informed by Kurt Vonnegut
The Thelma-and-Louise-Gambit
Eleven Theses on American Democracy
Hilary Putnam
Voting with your Middle Finger
Pragmatism’s Promise
One of the many definitions of “dialectic” is “a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to discover the truth”; another is “discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation.” On either definition, Richard J. Bernstein is indisputably the most proficient and prolific ...