Category: Uncategorized

  • Varieties of Stoicism

    Varieties of Stoicism

    What worries me about Silicon Valley’s mindfulness stoicism is the sense that it combines all the worst elements of world mastery and manliness with the stoicism of the weak: acceptance of injustice, the embrace of a hostile natural (and social!) world to which we must conform, and a quietism that locates our agency in that…

  • Joshua Miller’s Top Ten Things that Arendt Got Right About Political Theory

    Joshua Miller’s Top Ten Things that Arendt Got Right About Political Theory

    I wrote this little primer at the bottom of a long discussion of the Schocken Books editions of Arendt’s work, and then reposted it a while back on Facebook. It’s been popular, so I’m reposting it again here so I can easily link to it without feeding social media. Race-thinking precedes racism. Arendt’s analysis of…

  • Is Deliberate Underpolicing a Problem?

    Is Deliberate Underpolicing a Problem?

    Propublica thinks so: What Can Mayors Do When the Police Stop Doing Their Jobs? Rises and falls in crime rates are notoriously hard to explain definitively. Scholars still don’t agree on the causes of a decades long nationwide decline in crime. Still, some academics who have studied the phenomenon in recent years see evidence that rising rates of…

  • Come Work in Prison Education at Georgetown University

    Come Work in Prison Education at Georgetown University

    Georgetown has been committed to teaching in prisons in one way or another for almost forty years. The support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow us to redouble that commitment, with a bachelor’s degree and an expanded footprint in Maryland.

  • Supervision is a Major Barrier to Reentry

    Supervision is a Major Barrier to Reentry

    I’m speaking today at the RAND Corporation on “Career Prospects for People with Criminal Records.” While I’m there, I’ll speak about our work at the Prisons and Justice Initiative (founded by Marc Howard) at Georgetown University, focusing on the education work: the Scholars Program, the Paralegal Program, and the Pivot Program. In addition to discussing…

  • The New (Old) John Locke Manuscript on Catholics

    The New (Old) John Locke Manuscript on Catholics

    Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others I read about it in the Guardian yesterday, and my cousin at St. John’s found the digital copy right there on the internet in plain sight. Apparently no one had attempted to transcribe it yet? It’s a confusing document–looks like reading notes from some separate document, as there…