Is it true that there's nothing wrong with commodification that fair terms of social cooperation cannot cure?
Let’s identify the potential horror lurking in the proprietary relationships that some fans imagine they enjoy with celebrities.
Pain and grief are among our most private, isolating experiences.
Those committed to human rights at the global level should seek not to universalize the particular but rather to particularize the universal.
We know very little about what we are doing, why we do it, or how we feel about it.
Analyses of ghostwritten articles shows them to both exaggerate effectiveness and downplay adverse effects.
The author’s interpretive framework truncates the narrative by forcing her to see thick cultural issues only through the lens of social class.
What is a Catholic philosopher?
The civic and practical goals of humanistic learning are necessarily related to the project of human autonomy, for there can be no autonomy apart from the provisos and attributes of self-knowledge.
In a world filled with mobile people—economic immigrants and political exiles in particular—an old humanist ideal might help us to give shape to our lives.
If the clever human life form were to project its power in the form of technologically advanced, artificial offspring, would Nietzsche offer a principled objection, and if so, what would be its basis?
The unscientific foundation of science and technology is in need of wisdom, practical and theoretical, about human ends.
The ideology of the pure gift is not foreign or extraneous to the monetization of relationships.
Capitalism has been a form of enchantment, a metamorphosis of the sacred in the raiment of secularity. With money as its ontological marrow, it represents a moral and metaphysical imagination as well as a sublimation of our desire for the presence of divinity in the everyday world.
Our moral educations should happen at dinner tables, in classrooms, on football fields, in synagogues and churches.
There is a long series of instances in which public health agencies have responded to disease outbreaks with dangerous Pollyannaism, seemingly violating their core mission.
Mysteriously, biologically, men and women want, or want to want, “the same thing.”
Because of me, Alex will never realize his potential, never discover the man he might’ve been. I’m deeply sorry for that. And that’s the sort of existential shame I grapple with: Here I am, years later, sober and learning and writing and finding out who I can be, and yet Alex can never do any of those things. Because of me.
The devil was understood to be present and industrious, and America’s earliest forebears were quick to suss him out by his evil works.
Taking a hard look at the smart city requires that we ask not only where it might fail to live up to the promises of its boosters, but also where it is successful and how it might nonetheless still fail us as citizens and as human beings.
Many have suggested that cities should be the vanguard of global governance on issues such as climate, immigration, and terrorism.
Within cities themselves, new wealth has been greeted with great fanfare—except by those who see gentrification as a threat to the communities that remained during the decades of white flight.
Goats, like cats, are closer to nature than most domesticated animals, both species going feral more easily than domesticated dogs, which are rarely able to acclimate to life in the wild.
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
The fact is, work as we know it isn’t worth saving anyway.
Uncomfortable though it might be to admit, Heidegger’s thinking is part of the Jewish textual tradition.
Is Whole Foods a kind of morality tale, a story of what happens when a company that started with good intentions gets too big too fast?
Reconsidering the complex relationship between humans and the wider animal kingdom.
Mary Midgley’s writing was profound but rarely technical; she trained her sights on general problems.
In the long run, we all pay dearly for the carefully crafted commercial illusion that we can hold people to standards on a selective basis.
If we succeed in growing meat, we will do more than change human subsistence strategies forever.
Zagajewski’s poems call us to live more deeply, with both the ugliness and beauty of life, saying “but, just wait…there is more.”
What emerges in the essays in this issue is actually not one secularism, but rather a range of secularisms—French, American, Indian, and others— that can be compared, evaluated, and improved upon.
Social and cultural change, from the rise of the “information economy” to changes in family life to the technological mediation of our relationships, is happening all around us.
There seems to be little agreement on what it is that needs sustaining, let alone how we should go about it in practice.
The successful marketing of the “new science of morality” suggests its considerable allure for the popular imagination.
Untruth—information that could be described as unverified, misleading, or an out-and-out lie—has been spreading with new ease and abandon, and often to undemocratic effect.
Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely.
Distance can breed ignorance of the ecosystems and individual animal lives that feed us.
Food is a strong proof of our animality; it is equally strong evidence of how we transcend it.
We are living through a vertigo in political culture.
We bad-movie watchers have our own anticriteria, the sorts of badness we prefer.
A grotesque and caricatured version of Simone Weil undermines an otherwise good book.
Like a lover of endangered species, the lover of endangered words jumps for joy when he sees a word being rescued.
Gustav Theodor Fechner’s soul neither defies naturalism nor depends on revelation.
Moral growth doesn’t just mean looking to the future but reconciling past and present selfhood. It demands regret.
Quantification is more than merely a means of communication and persuasion in a fragmented culture.
How are we ethically to evaluate the practice of getting stoned?
Modernity needs to be revealed to us, because it so successfully hides its true character, insulating itself against revision and correction.
In the event you needed any further bad news in this year of the coronavirus pandemic, you’ll find it in this piercing, distressing, and shaming account of our tendency to follow the herd.
We need more profanity? Aren’t we already being inundated with it?
Every society in history has limited speech in some way, yet some have remained freer than others.
Far beyond the opera house and the concert hall, we are living in a world Wagner helped make.
Given the gorgeousness of George Eliot’s own prose, her translation’s eloquence comes as no surprise.
In the words of retired Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, “a people confident in its laws and institutions should not be ashamed of mercy.”
Like the “radical orthodoxy” associated with John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, and an array of other British and American theologians, Hart’s project of rejuvenation has been no narrowly theological or academic exercise.
Cancel ’s murkiness has made it a very useful word for pushing already contentious or delicate matters into the realm of total confusion.
We might be murderers, and we might not, but isn’t it safer to assume we are and be proven wrong? Maybe not.
When you bring children into being, you give them the gift of life, but you also impose on them these terrible costs.
On locating the sublimity of art within the world and within history.
The disagreement between modernism and the contemporary discourse of “self-help” is not about whether literature has “therapeutic” capacities.
Privilege today still comes with strings attached, but they are different now.
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.
Consider embracing utopia at once as indeterminate speculation about a qualitatively better future and as a hypothesis, by assuming it to be possible.
Charlottesville city councilor Kathy Galvin on the challenges of city governance
Cities are increasingly being eyed by tech companies for their social dynamism and ability to generate innovation. This will have tremendous consequences for the future of society.
The virtual dimensions of assembly may yield insights for how we understand more traditional assemblies and the legal protections that we assign to them.
What's the real-world significance of arguing in a New York Times op-ed that life doesn't exist? More than we might initially think.
Empirical verifiability is great when you can get it. But the worry here is what might happen to our self-understanding as human beings if we become willing to trade in an understanding of a rich and meaning-laden feature of our nature for, well, something we can share with a rat.
A monkey's selfie has done more than just raise awareness about an endangered species.
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.
Pantone's Marsala is no mauve, but it does reflect our present cultural mood.
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.
Meaningful social change requires the kind of social reconciliation that can only emerge through aggregated instances of both forgiveness and repentance.
For the editors of The Economist, euthanasia is "an idea whose time has come."
Francis’s integral ecology challenges some tendencies on both the right and the left.
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.
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.
A translation of English to English presumes that ambiguity of language is always a flaw—but it’s not.
With our colleagues, and with our students, we have the space not only to express disagreement in more than tweets and sound bites, but also to probe the reasons underlying our disagreement.
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?
A zero sum reality, in which every win is someone else’s loss, exists in a constant state of crisis.
We can’t take CEOs’ high-flown gestures at face value.
How do we more lastingly move beyond the impasses we have reached on a host of ethical issues at the heart of our highly politicized culture wars?
Our exploitive relationship to the natural order is greatly magnifying the possibility of spillover and increasing virus virulence.
To make promises, to stand by one words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame.
The point of reopening is not to free voluntary workers but to place more into the category of “mandatory worker.”
A human spirit of community and kindness can be learned. But it can also be forgotten.
Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.
The gap between our concepts of love and justice has served us poorly.
We need to preserve a distinction between recognizing our transgressions and resolving to change, on one hand, and imagining that we can forgive ourselves, on the other.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
What haunted Edmund was a fear of being second best.
Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
Henry James’s fiction shows how aesthetic misjudgments can be connected to moral vice.
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?