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The recent controversy sparked by Nicholas Kristof's lament over university professors' self-imposed irrelevance is nothing new. Kant, for example, handled the dilemma of scholarly writing vs. popular writing in his own way.
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The ancient Greeks bestowed to European civilization three great political technologies: the spectacle, the square, and rhetoric. This long winter we have seen each at work in remarkable ways in Russia and Ukraine.
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Data is hard won, theoretically complicated, and wrapped up with questions of value, questions that Leon Wieseltier claims Nate Silver and all his "intimidating" fellow data journalists fear. But that's just not true.
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The real problem, as everybody knows, is not that the internet is ruining writing. It’s writing. There’s just too much of it.
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Avoiding technology may sound like a noble feat of asceticism, but it's neither possible nor desirable. Technologies are part of us.
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To be “disappeared”—a perverse if starkly accurate use of the passive voice—is not just to be kidnapped or killed. It is to be removed from the political world in such a way that no public memory or imagination is allowed.