Alexander Stern is the author of The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning and is an editor at Commonweal.
The cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance.
In any case, trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration.
Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.
Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas.