Videos

In TRIPPED (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/tripped-norman-ohler?variant=41080670289954) , his intriguing new history of drugs and postwar America, the German writer Norman Ohler makes LSD both a symbol and a metaphor for the history of the Cold War. Linking Nazi Germany, the CIA with what he calls “the dawn” of the psychedelic age, Ohler presents…

How to put America back together? Few people have thought more about this Humpty Dumpty style challenge than Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the 2016 classic Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning/dp/1620972255/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.RpBgtjz47u7C92rZHbBmPOIwkfIoyhj-cFcy81tvzdR2L5lkgoG4F60L8UTZ6sH1LemwBkBd4iMX1Yco7gNkJXV_Abj2wBqCxECc0JUgoRVXUZJedKDXTGZCGHSiIj8Z7VdJ6KEKbZ2pweL_mQEL90jWGbGtaq3Q3BsWNQvhIKMhAGfEBxPoSZFdizregbamkwldppxN873b3WwBD5tbnd99aY8EfnhoDOGR_SYax_U.zjUAGqbJrURKEJA2pjMLqyHGLnruMyd2t5K9EvmyPxA&qid=1712073674&sr=8-1) . So when I sat down with Hochschild for my new…

Like all immigrants who fled to the U.S. to escape civil war, Ismar Volic has a deep personal appreciation for American democracy. And Volic - a Bosnian refugee from the Yugoslavian civil war who is now director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College - fears that…

Becca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250849915/allthingsaretoosmall) , challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks, praising the New York City diner who orders and eats several plates of…

According to David Masciotra, the real battleground for the future of American democracy lies in that no-man’s land between suburban and rural America - what he calls the “exurb”. It’s here, Masciotra argues in his new book EXURBIA NOW (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/740832/exurbia-now-by-david-masciotra/) , that we can find the pathologies of a 21st…

The Daily Mail called him (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12572601/art-world-collector-Stefan-Simchowitz.html) the “Sith Lord” of the art world, the New York Times annointed him a (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-art-worlds-patron-satan.html) s the art world’s Patron Satan”, while the Wall Street Journal described him (https://www.wsj.com/style/design/stefan-simchowitz-art-dealer-los-angeles-6dd51d25) as the dealer the art world “loves to hate”. Californian voters aren’t too keen on…

Is it really conceivable that Apple will withdraw its products and services from the entire European Union? What might sound absurd is actually conceivable, That Was the Week (https://thatwastheweek.substack.com/) ’s Keith Teare says, because of what he sees as the EU’s increasingly autocratic behavior toward big tech US companies like…

On the front page of her website (http://www.drbhibbs.com/) , the family therapist and psychologist B. Janet Hibbs quotes Kierkegaard’s observation that “we live our lives forward, but understand them backwards.” But her coauthored You’re Not Done Yet: Parenting Young Adults in an Age of Uncertainty (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250283238/yourenotdoneyet) seems to reverse that…

In his 1887 polemic, On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche suggested that the idea of good and evil, of morality itself, might have been born by slaves. Candida Moss, who holds the Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham, riffs off this Nietzchean idea by suggesting that…

Few conservatives or Christians have stood up to Donald Trump with the coherence and bravery of The New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner. “I think morality is to Trump what color is to a person who is colorblind”, Wehner told me. And, in contrast with the ethically monochromatic…

Surveillance capitalism is ubiquitous. If we’re not being watched by Google or Facebook, then we are watching movies warning about how these digital platforms are watching us. David Donnelly’s new documentary, COST OF CONVENIENCE (https://costofconvenience.film/) , trots all the familiar charges that we’ve heard over the years from KEEN ON…

Dive into the delicate balance of discussing anti-racism strategies without triggering the minefield of identity politics. As debates become more polarized, uncover the stark reality of confronting anti-racism tactics and the challenge of staying true to one's stance in the face of potential backlash. Listen to this critical conversation that…