Cure-alls and Remedies
Thomas Edsall has a good review of some recent research on polarization in the New York Times today: The strength of a voter’s identity as a Democrat or Republican drives political engagement more than personal gain. Better educated voters more readily form “identity centric” political commitments to their party of choice, which goes a long…
James Forman, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize last week for his book Locking Up Our Own. It is well-deserved. That book– and his earlier work wrangling with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow –shows the ways that we have arrived at the wicked problem of mass incarceration through something much harder to disdain than evil scheming…
It’s been twenty years since Ansolabehere and Iyengar published Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink & Polarize the Electorate.
We need trust to know–even if we’ll also be misled into error by that trust.
(Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a reading of the political economy of Moana, and you just have to write it down. I regret nothing!)
I’m in Dallas, Texas for the the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison. Today I’ll be presenting a paper from a larger project on loyalty and social science research methods which draws on an argument I first encountered in Peter Levine’s work . Here’s a link to the PowerPoint of my talk. It is…
What is the connection between hylozoism, atheism, and egalitarianism? Kojin Karatani suggests an answer, and I wrangle with the New Atheists along the way.
(This post is part of a roundrobin reading group on Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. I focus here on chapter one; James Stanescu previously discussed the preface and appendix, and Joseph Trullinger will be discussing chapter two in the next few days.) In a certain sense, much of Karatani’s book is a…
Hannah Arendt never wrote a “moral philosophy.” It is not hidden away in the archives or any of the recent collections of her work, nor in her unpublished lectures, letters, or journals. She was a political theorist who thought that moral philosophy requires a set of social relations that are inaccessible in the modern world. Yet as she has become more popular and is taught more and more often by moral philosophers, she is developing an unearned reputation as a moralist that perverts both what we should mean by moral philosophy and what she hoped to show us about the world we now inhabit.
I know it’s become standard fare for liberals to criticize Republicans for injustice. But I want to take a strong stand against this disgusting display, in which the Governor of Ohio, acting as a public official, told the world: “We want all the immigrants to come to Ohio, because we know how much they contribute…