Ecology, Security, and the Death of Liberal Democracy
In a recent episode of the FX series Fargo, Minnesota Sheriff Lou Solverson answers a key witness’s refusal to accept police protection from a local crime syndicate by recounting his experience in Vietnam: “There’s a look a boy gets when he’s been shot, or a landmine takes off his legs, …
Orbán’s Politics of Fear and Hatred in Hungary
On a European nation's far-right response to the refugee crisis
Although the position on the migrant issue put forward by the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, is morally hard to digest, many people think it is nevertheless the only way to save Europe from the flood of masses that threatens to destabilize the continent. I dispute this opinion. In addition to the moral issues it presents, Orbán’s plan for Europe is doomed to end in disaster. …
Not Fade Away: Joan Didion’s Hollywood Life
A review of the new biography
Who is Joan Didion anyway? In The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, Tracy Daugherty decided to find the writer in her most public work. “Does the life reveal the art, the art the life?” he asks in the prologue (xxiii). If you find fault with The Last Love Song it will be in this decision — not in Daugherty’s entertaining style, which often reads like the New Journalism that Didion helped to establish; nor in his …
Zuckerberg & Chan Are Us
Philanthrocapitalism and the public good
Almost forty-eight years to the day before Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced the creation of their limited liability company and pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares within their lifetimes, a lawyer lectured a roomful of stockbrokers on “How to Obtain Maximum Tax Advantages by Using Securities …
Magic Geography of the Cold War
In 1941, during World War II, German émigré sociologist Hans Speier wrote an essay in Social Research titled, “Magic Geography.” In this essay, he argues, “Maps are not confined to the representation of a given state of affairs. They can be drawn to symbolize changes, or as blueprints of the future. They may make certain traits …
Challenging the Status Quo on Therapy’s Place in Schizophrenia Treatment
A discussion of recent developments
Historic wisdom has held that high doses of antipsychotic medications are the most effective treatment for schizophrenia — but that wisdom has been challenged by a new study reported in an article in …
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 …
Margo Jefferson’s Coming of Age in Negroland
One of my fondest memories from the New School for Social Research Liberal Studies MA program comes from a course titled “Representations of Race and Gender in American Culture.” It was the day, about halfway through the semester, when co-teachers Elizabeth Kendall (author of feminist studies of early modern dance and 1930s screwball …