America’s Cloven Fiction
Mark Edmundson
By affirming one side and suppressing the other, we make ourselves into half men and half women.
By affirming one side and suppressing the other, we make ourselves into half men and half women.
Are we willing to undertake the long, slow work of persuasion in a time of the politics of personal destruction?
The red vs. blue electoral map has contributed to the toxicity of our politics.
Media executives have honed the craft of attracting national interest to flair-ups and clashes over school board proceedings, controversial small business practices, or more recently, police misconduct.
Perhaps computers are so bad at conversation because it is something like prayer.
Because this cannot be ignored. And because it may be prologue to the future.
The benefits of the humanities have danced so gracefully through these tutorials that it’s never occurred to any of us to ask what’s the point.
I observed that the most effective communicators delivered the most histrionic performances.
The modern state is founded on a dream—the dream of perfect knowledge that secures perfect power.
Even defenders of the idea today such as Bruno Latour admit that Gaia in the original Greek context is “a figure of violence."
It would be prudent to take the Chinese at their word––especially if it is bound up in the mystifying language of Carl Schmitt.
We view the concept of “compromise” from all sorts of oblique angles.
That means, first, that I have to love my neighbor—my colleague—above my own productivity.
Taking pleasure in a well-crafted sentence is a good in itself.
Pretending that all workers are the same obscures rather than clarifies the reality of class.
Postliberalism comes to embody a form of cultural criticism that ultimately does not believe in culture itself.
Models are only valuable in the long run if we are free to take them apart.
Everyone contributes to the pandemic, so all bear responsibility.
Western liberal democracy is something worth aspiring to—an optimal destiny, not an imminent fate.
Once upon a time there was a publication that was doing all it could to tell a straight story and to listen to all sides.
Self-knowledge and pleasure, the Idiosyncratics teach us, go hand in hand through the library.
The question I want to ask is simply this: Is the writing of a Life a game that, in our current moment, can be played?
Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.
What makes someone a likely Substack star is an ability to cultivate one-way, parasocial relationships with readers.
When I give myself over to the self-writers I love most, I am transformed.
The pulsating song of billions of seventeen-year cicadas.
Henry James’s fiction shows how aesthetic misjudgments can be connected to moral vice.
If you get out in your yard with a push mower, everyone who passes wants to talk with you about it.
Renewing your weaks social ties might make your closest ties stronger.
Like the tenants of the Bishop of Worcester, they know that in a tightening job market they have leverage.
The workplace had become so toxic that it was affecting my well-being.
What if the more successful political commentators on Substack, or music teachers on YouTube, or masters of the podcast interview, began to teach their craft to others?
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
A trick that only the most gifted demagogues can bring off.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
The events of January 6 went off script.
Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.
A zero sum reality, in which every win is someone else’s loss, exists in a constant state of crisis.
In spite of myself, something in my gut told me that the statue of General Robert E. Lee should have stayed.
What we really need right now is a new kind of hero—calling all historians!
“Crisis” itself is in crisis, such that both the structure and urgency of the crisis of climate change could elude us.
What should the compensation be for overserving a prison sentence?
Confident pluralism at its best requires people and institutions that know themselves well enough to articulate the reasons for their differences.
Just as Obama became a symbol of progressive diversity, Trump has become a symbol of longing for a pre-Obama America.
Many began watching last night’s debate wondering: Which Trump would it be? But there’s only one.
Is it enough for a business to turn a profit? Or should a business cultivate human flourishing and shared prosperity to be considered a success?
In identifying “the system” as the issue of this election, Trump has managed to find a singular concept by which to encompass issues from wage stagnation to political corruption.
Numbers and big data may be able to show us how to do things better, but they cannot show us how to do things.
As we remember the Challenger disaster, let’s not forget the engineers who tried to convince NASA not to send up the Space Shuttle on a cold morning thirty years ago.
Teenagers have multiple motivations for their use of social media, but a concern about their status with other peers is certainly central—and social visibility is a prerequisite to such status.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; even smaller minds complain about the rest of these people.
After situating themselves in a “wild” context, both women do what the entire history of nature writing has implicitly instructed them not to do: they bring their emotional backpacks into the landscape.
Is the science in social science worth defending? The short answer is yes, and the long answer is that it depends on how you define science.
If we want the Internet to remain free and open for everyone, is it right to exclude bullies and jerks? Lessons from the Ellen Pao incident.
It's just not possible to love something that says “be unique, but only as unique as we'll allow you to be.”
Summer reads from THR staff and friends.
Francis’s integral ecology challenges some tendencies on both the right and the left.
For the editors of The Economist, euthanasia is "an idea whose time has come."
Meaningful social change requires the kind of social reconciliation that can only emerge through aggregated instances of both forgiveness and repentance.
New Orleans, where spectacle and transgression are part of the infrastructure, is the ideal place to conduct completely unscientific research on tattooing.
We have no way of knowing whether Tsarnaev was given the opportunity to avoid a trial and plead to a life sentence, or if he would have taken that offer had it been made. It seems clear that there are inconsistencies when government determines when to seek death sentences.
When did we stop believing in rehabilitation? The case of Lima-Marin should make us stop and ask why we punish, and what happens to those we punish.
Is plain packaging for cigarettes a barrier to trade?
If technology rarely delivers on its claims, then need we waste so much as a backward glance as we dash ahead to the next digital milestone?
Cubism’s stylistic hegemony—the dislocated binaries, the tactile surfaces in a two-dimensional work, and the distortions—interferes with what we want to understand about what few clues we can decipher.
Moyn's ambition for the discipline of history undercuts its legitimacy as a distinct form of knowledge and denies the ethic of the craft.
Taylor Swift’s recent trademarking frenzy is another example of how artists are scrambling to maintain control over their work in the face of the digital tsunami.
To reduce a museum experience to the laws of supply and demand devalues not only the art itself but also the curators’ years of education and expertise—connoisseurship on which we rely in institutions that position themselves as cultural arbiters.
Pantone's Marsala is no mauve, but it does reflect our present cultural mood.
Looking for some stories for Halloween? Start here.
Whole Foods Market is tired of your “whole paycheck” jokes. Recently, “America’s healthiest grocery store” launched a multi-million dollar advertising campaign titled Values Matter.
The virtual dimensions of assembly may yield insights for how we understand more traditional assemblies and the legal protections that we assign to them.
A monkey's selfie has done more than just raise awareness about an endangered species.
It is this extension of protections to for-profit corporations (closely held), that has moved early commentary from the legal academy to conclude that the most enduring legacy of Hobby Lobby may not be in the area of religious liberty but, rather, in an expanded (and expanding) notion of corporate personhood
“My word is my bond,” business “done with a handshake,” and “honor codes” are not even the rhetoric of the day, much less the reality.
As Winter Storm Pax pushes across the eastern United States this week, I find myself pondering the power of names.