Alexander Stern is the features editor at Commonweal and the author of The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning.
One is encouraged to curate—if not outright fabricate—details from one’s personal life to present to the market.
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.