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Resisting the Fatalism of the Behavioral Revolution
I love Peter Levine’s latest post, “don’t let the behavioral revolution make you fatalistic.” “Tversky’s and Kahneman’s revolutionary program spread across the behavioral sciences and constantly reveals new biases that are predictable enough to bear their own names. […] These phenomena are held to be deeply rooted in the cognitive limitations of human beings as creatures who evolved…
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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…