Happy New Year? A Public Seminar Year in Review
Looking back on a tumultuous but productive 2015
How can we wish each other a Happy New Year when the year ending, on the global stage, has been such an unhappy one? Of course, as individuals in our private lives, many of us may have had a good year and may look forward to a better one. But on the public stage, the year has been an extremely troubling, with few hopeful prospects. These are dark times. …
For the Last Time: “The West”
Revisiting the myth of the clash of civilizations
As information about the attacks in Paris, which left at least 128 people dead, gradually unfolds, I feel overwhelmed and disturbed. I am overwhelmed by the quantity of affective response to which I add my own grief, but I am also deeply disturbed by the way in which this affective reaction is channeled …
A Conversation with Edward Koren
“We deal with it by talking about it”
The Sandor Ferenczi Center at the New School recently had the pleasure of having longtime New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren discuss his craft as part of its Arts in Mind series. The title of the event, “We deal with it by talking about it,” was derived from a well known New Yorker cartoon of Koren’s.
The evening was moderated by essayist and author, Joshua Shenk and psychologist, Jeremy Safran. Koren was interviewed by Richard Gehr, author of I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists. …
Vilnius and Warsaw: Our Common Cause
Upon receipt of the Freedom Prize
Mrs. President, Mrs. Chair of the Parliament, Mr. Prime Minister,
I am moved and embarrassed by this honor bestowed by the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania on a Pole — a Polish journalist and editor of Gazeta Wyborcza. I treat it as a sign of recognition for my friends and colleagues who supported Lithuanian strivings for independence and democracy from the very beginning — and this includes people from the era of democratic opposition and those who later came together around “Gazeta.” The Polish democratic opposition always wanted a sovereign and democratic Lithuania to be a friendly neighbor of a sovereign and democratic Poland. …
A Postcard from France: A Canadian in Avignon
To provide some context for what follows: I live in France, in the small southern city of Avignon. My wife, Audrey, is French, but I’m not. I, like so many others here, am “an immigrant.” Recent events have made the last few days emotionally and intellectually complex. I’ve been, at times, angry, exhausted, bewildered, and blasé.
Seven Steps toward Enlightenment: The Case of the French Killings
When a crystal breaks, it breaks along lines of pre-existing weakness. Thus traumatic assaults, like the one in Paris, can serve as X-rays into the body politic that endures them. Certainly, the US invasion of Iraq, a response to 9/11, serves as a paradigm case of how a terroristic attack can provoke the blind aggressivity otherwise obscured and disguised in the self-professed guarantor of world peace. By examining the range of responses to the massacre at Hebdo, we can learn something more about ourselves, and perhaps correct our mistaken stance. In my view there are seven levels of response to these attacks, each a mixture of ideology and truth, progressing closer and closer to something comprehensive and just, albeit also elegiac and incomplete. …