Category: Uncategorized
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“Expanding College Opportunity in Our Nation’s Prisons”
College in prisons is the easiest and most obvious of a host of criminal justice reforms that we absolutely must be making and for which there is bipartisan support. We incarcerate 2.3 million people in the US, at a rate more than seven times higher than the global average. We’re not seven times more violent…
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Hannah Arendt on Academic Freedom
We often say that colleges and universities deserve some sort of freedom from political interference. But for Arendt, freedom just is politics. The idea of freedom from politics is largely oxymoronic for her, and involves fundamental misunderstandings of the component terms “freedom” and “politics.”
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Civics, Gaming, and the Commons
This past weekend, we inaugurated a new competition soliciting “civic games.” Hopefully it will become an annual contest, but for now the most vexing question coming from game designers is: “What makes a game civic?” Our definition of civics offers little help: we argue that civics is an expansive conception of politics, understood as a response…
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Trump, Trust, and Civic Renewal
More than anything else, the current political climate shifts the kinds of solutions for which our fellow citizens will reach. Rather than hoping to make change at the national level, we must organize our political lives around more local efforts. Rather than seeking assistance from state institutions we must organize and act ourselves. I have…
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Advice and Consent
“To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State…
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Reasons for the Season
Hanukology: It was basically an argument between two points of view that mixed abstractions and interests (as always), but (also as always) with variations and fluctuations, mind-changes and occasional betrayals. To simplify somewhat, one side, those who later (in Hasmonean times, see below) became known as Saducees, were religious conservatives but pro-Hellenist cultural liberals; the…
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2016 Best List
Let those with enough time to consume all the media in a field decide on the objective bests-of-2016. What follows is a completely subjective list of bests, idiosyncratically limited by what I’ve actually had time to watch, read, or listen to: Best New Book in Philosophy: We don’t think hard enough about the metaphysics that…
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“That man who has nothing to lose:” Black Americans and Superfluousness
Long before white Americans felt like their society had abandoned them, Black Americans knew the feeling. Just like whites do today, some Black Americans responded to earlier superfluousness by “clinging to guns and religion” to use Barack Obama’s famous analysis. (cf. Kinsley gaffe) Here’s James Baldwin, describing the Nation of Islam: “I’ve come,” said Elijah,…
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Any Cook Can Govern: Populism and Progressivism
I have lots of feels and lots of arguments about these two pieces by Peter Levine on an alt-left populism: “pluralist populism” and “separating populism from anti-intellectualism.” (This post on identity politics is also relevant.) Peter even goes so far as to call himself a populist, which is a surprising move to restore the term’s…
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Your Enemy is Your Best Teacher
They played constitutional hardball, and won. Maybe Democrats should try that.