By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Middle age is widely believed to be challenging, because it is the point at which we become uncomfortably aware of our mortality. I turned 50 this year, and my own experience has been that the hardest thing about middle age is that it is the time when one simultaneously has to manage one’s children’s adolescence […]
by Mark English Having written recently about shared narratives and their role in creating a common culture, I thought it might be worthwhile to try to develop a few of the points I have been making and to clarify the foundation – personal and intellectual – upon which my claims rest. Now, the idea of a common culture – whether […]
by Daniel A. Kaufman Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity. If men lacked this capacity of being infected by art, people might be more savage still, and above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one […]
by Margaret Rowley Multiple news sources have detailed Stephen Miller’s recent accusation hurled at Jim Acosta of “cosmopolitan bias,” an insult that has been recently and repeatedly levied at so-called “left-leaning” news networks. Acosta: This whole notion of they have to learn English before they get to the United States, are we just going to bring in people from Great […]
by Mark English A busker. A real musician, this one, with an acoustic guitar and a small amplifier, operating on a (by then) relatively quiet city street corner late the other night. You know how it is. You hear a song that is vaguely familiar, and you want to identify it. You Google a couple of keywords or phrases from […]
By Dan Tippens In Roger William’s The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, a quantum super computer, Prime Intellect, operating on an essentially utilitarian calculus, decides that it would be best for mankind if he were to upload everyone to cyberspace, so that he could protect them from every manner of harm, give them as many possessions and as much land as they […]
Read The New York Diary Part I here. Being the experiences and adventures of a young, single, appallingly poor, surprisingly clean, twenty-something magazine proprietor and philosopher in Gotham. By Daniel Tippens In Manhattan, renting an apartment involves three actors: the customer, the broker, and the landlord. Brokers have access to two types of properties: Exclusive and non-exclusive listings. The former […]
By Daniel Tippens In 2014, Elizabeth Barnes published a paper in Ethics with the title “Valuing Disability, Causing Disability.” Barnes is disabled herself and observes that there seems to be a striking difference between philosophers and disabled individuals, when it comes to their intuitions about the well-being of disabled people. Philosophers tend to hold what she calls the “bad-difference” view: […]
By David Ottlinger I was as surprised as anyone by the rise of Donald Trump. I feel no superiority to the many commenters who, faced with what seemed impossible, have been scurrying around looking for what they had missed. I have been doing the same. In fact, it has been one of those rare moments when the seas of ink […]
by Mark English Academics and other intellectuals have always played a role in public life, and one of their most important roles has been to speak out and to engage – through newspapers and the electronic media, for example – with a wider audience. But, over the last half-century or more, I think there has been a subtle shift in […]
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