The shaping and conditioning of our self-understanding by consumption is one form of the commodification of self.
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.
Hope is not a simple “denial” of reality, but something that is painstakingly cultivated. Part of the struggle for hope involves a shift of perception in light of changing circumstances.
The ways in which the concept of “religion” operates in that culture as motive and as effect, how it mutates, what it affords and obstructs, what memories it shelters or excludes, are not eternally fixed.
Cosmopolitanism commits you to a global conversation, or a set of global conversations, about the things that matter.
Thinking more deeply about how we can inhabit the public sphere with others.
For the people to be sovereign, they need to form an entity and have a personality.
The root notion of the secular is a contrast not to religion but to eternity.
The nature and purposes of the family, education, science, faith, business, the media, and government itself are all disputed at a fundamental level.
American differences are neither random nor ad hoc.
The Frankfurt School scholars were motivated by their admiration for and their critique of American social science.
We have too few occasions to do anything because of a certain pre-determination of things from afar.
Autonomy becomes necessity when efficiency is the universal measure.
There are certain kinds of work that thwart the logic of remote control.
Depression’s prevalence can be attributed to the reduced importance of the notion of conflict.
To what degree have we turned away from the public sphere and the obligations it lays upon us? Has this happened across all realms of life, or more in some realms and less in others?
The rate of change, the kinds of change, and the scope of change taking place today are impossible to understand without also looking at the ways they are affecting societies and how we understand and experience ourselves and others.
We no longer experience a world, or sense ourselves as the subject of that experience; we are, rather, shrouded and carried along in the moodiness of the present.
The available terms for making better sense of the human predicament are plentiful, but most are currently buried beneath layers of exhausted soil.
We know very little about what we are doing, why we do it, or how we feel about it.
An Modern Language Association (MLA) study calling for curricular reform that addresses the need for increased language instruction and incorporates cultural and historical reflection.
The Kinsey agenda remains alive as key justifications for counting up sexual acts.
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.
Economies of dignity shape what people talk about and how people talk about others.
Efforts to engage many emerging adults in serious moral reflection are met with bewilderment.
The exasperated tone with which evolutionary scientists, philosophers of science, and others on the side of science and philosophy received Nagel’s book was struck early.
Like it or not, the basis of human culture has a great deal to do with the evolution of a socio-affective/social-cognitive infrastructure that opens up an enormous arc of possibility.
The lack of focus on the self-made man in recent times is remarkable when one considers how intensely, and how long, it has functioned as a central trope of the American experience.
Among their many meanings, zombies have come to symbolize the force of globalization.
The hope of reform and renewal, the conviction that things could get better, was crucial to the founding of this nation.
MLK’s American Dream always appealed to the value of equality.
The original definition of the American Dream was rooted in the democratic principles of both the Founding Fathers and nineteenth-century transcendentalists.
Recent studies suggest that working on happiness may be counterproductive.
The marketplace has infiltrated intimate life and transformed the self.
This is a fertile time in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science for thinking about attention.
Venues now available for many more competing voices, together with the multiplying perspectives of our times—hailed as liberating diversity—serve as dispensation to believe in anything, everything, or nothing.
The aim is to re-examine the period up to the 1923 establishment of the Irish Free State in order to get beyond traditional approaches to understanding revolutionary change in terms of class or ideology.
Our moral educations should happen at dinner tables, in classrooms, on football fields, in synagogues and churches.
A eulogy for book culture, a polemic against the online-content economy that has replaced it, and an international, interreligious romp.
Taking the Socratic tradition to Palestine, Indonesia, New York’s Hasidic community, Brazil, and the Akwesasne Territory.
The culture wars have led to a deep sense of loss for most normative Americans.
Confusion about our digital technologies and their use is not limited to the masters of Silicon Valley.
According to the realists, power is real, and all else is illusion.
Conceding the pathological potential of narcissism, the book affirms that it can also be a “wellspring of human ambition and creativity, values and ideals, empathy and fellow feeling.
How Chinese and Indian modernizers adopted and transformed modern Western notions of “spirituality” in order to criticize Western materialism.
Herbert Hoover’s US Food Administration did more than simply change Americans’ eating habits.
To the arguments of Huxley and Tyndall against traditional religion, Yeats had no answer until literature and the other arts came to the rescue.
This was the nightmare of scientific progress: The truths of today would become the falsehoods—or at least the errors—of tomorrow.
The invisibility of embedded science is an apparently paradoxical, but reliable, index of the significance of science for everyday life—for government, for commerce, and, not least, for our sense of self.
Since 1970, temporary labor has become part of the everyday fabric of work across all segments of society, from the bottom to the top.
In the course of becoming a professional, a person is learning to fill a certain role in society.
The solution to the unraveling of the social contract of employment may not be to prop up the ailing traditional job but, instead, to imagine what other forms work lives might take.
The role of frank speech in democratic culture is something worth considering, especially in light of the renewed ferment over political correctness.
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.
Between Jefferson’s profession of faith in the virtues of republican simplicity and the style of his own life the contradiction could hardly be greater.
Today the threat against liberalism is one of atrophy rather than violent death.
Resolved to reconcile the simultaneous horror and beauty of home, William Christenberry began the annual pilgrimages back south.
The devil was understood to be present and industrious, and America’s earliest forebears were quick to suss him out by his evil works.
American politics thrives on exploiting confusion about real and perceived interests, whether those interests are tied to region or class, or both.
We have harbored an ideology expressive of all-inclusiveness—one referred to with deceptive informality as the “American way of life.”
Great as they are, the challenges of the digital age are not only profoundly intellectual and conceptual.
At the beginning of the digital revolution, there existed a speculative energy that we could use now. It was put at the service not of innovation or disruption but of maintenance and politics, of establishing categories to put our digital world on a better course.
I am concerned with the quality of our choices as choices, and I am interested in excavating from our behaviors and artifacts an archaeology of our emotional life in the hope that naming these feelings can help us begin to reclaim our choices as our own.
The fact is, work as we know it isn’t worth saving anyway.
The principal experience of the art I encountered, I found, was not the art itself, but the uncertainty and complexity of my own subjective response.
Our political moment demands to see who we are—a beautiful and terrifying ordeal.
Zagajewski’s poems call us to live more deeply, with both the ugliness and beauty of life, saying “but, just wait…there is more.”
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.
Work is not just an economic matter. Beyond survival, a range of other human values and ideals are at stake.
The successful marketing of the “new science of morality” suggests its considerable allure for the popular imagination.
How the American Dream—hope in the future—competes in these times with a pervasive pessimism.
Is the whole world slouching toward a Panopticon of digitally enabled surveillance and control?
Desire has become longing’s counterfeit.
Why do dreams, aside from those that prove uncannily prophetic, not befit our biography?
The interplay of friendship and technology has been far longer-running than we think.
The death and life of the great American hipster offers an alternative history of culture over the last quarter century.
Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely.
The personal diet has become not only a cult; it has become a political statement.
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.
Baring introduces a community of thinkers whose contributions have been obscured.
It is hard to sustain the illusion that there is anything good about winter after the hundredth day or so.
Gustav Theodor Fechner’s soul neither defies naturalism nor depends on revelation.
Today’s witches are no longer experts in the “occult.” Instead, they rush to aid the downtrodden—and to publish their potion recipes in best-selling how-to guides.
As a child, I thought that to be American was to believe in individuality, to support pluralism and equality, and to celebrate common holidays and eat common foods.
Moral growth doesn’t just mean looking to the future but reconciling past and present selfhood. It demands regret.
We might do a better job of living together if we believed that we are meant to do so.
True crime is not quite about watching people die, but it does require an interest in the subject.
We are coming to see our world as increasingly discontinuous with the twentieth century.
Statistics in the Progressive Era were more than mere signs of a managerial government’s early efforts to sort and categorize its citizens.
Metrics do not and, in fact, cannot measure any intelligible conception of excellence at all
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?
If being sensible was no virtue to my father, being fantastic was just as bad.
King’s arguments for freedom and justice were not only constitutional but also profoundly ethical.
Once attacked for rejecting American exceptionalism, liberals now are in almost sole possession of it.
It is the irreducibly human dimensions of the radical life that are to be most cherished, and most feared.
The humanities may have suddenly mattered more than ever, but their support was also as fragile as it had been for decades.
A historian charts the evolution of her own center-right liberalism.
By suggesting that the constant resetting is all there is, disruption becomes “a theodicy of hypercapitalism,” a kind of “newness for people who are scared of genuine newness.”
Cancel ’s murkiness has made it a very useful word for pushing already contentious or delicate matters into the realm of total confusion.
What do we mean by culture? Don’t ask me, I’m a political scientist.
Straight women are not unusually boring. We are, however, coded.
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
All modern forms of government presume an objectification of their citizens.
On locating the sublimity of art within the world and within history.
On the surface, “normal” might seem harmless, charmingly self-deprecating, maybe even endearing.
The disagreement between modernism and the contemporary discourse of “self-help” is not about whether literature has “therapeutic” capacities.
What is clear is that the great divisions in our country rest on our different systems of cultural capital.
The less politics effects change, the more politics will affect mood.
The title of "doctor" is a very useful thing, provided you can make other people believe it is important.
Concern with authenticity seems to be unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchies.
Learning to read for the possibility or the certainty of laughter in the writings of Phillis Wheatley.
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
How is an alignment of the authentic self and the college admissions process possible?
We used to want to assimilate into the mainstream. Now identity is front and center of what we want the world to know about us.
Augustine is crucial to determining the continuity and dissimilarity between the Romans and ourselves.
The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness.
The captivity narrative is the most American of genres, not just in fostering fear, paranoia, and violence but in contributing to the creation myth of a new variety of person: the American.
Why precisely are the most fortunate of us the most restless? How can our private, individual restlessness explain our public, political sclerosis?
Perhaps we can tuck our disagreements about fundamental things away into our private lives, and let the public sphere be a place for adjudicating public things.
As much as we may wish otherwise, history gives us few reasons to believe that its moral arc bends toward justice.
We are living through a time, however, when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.
Putin continues to play the Third Rome card that has brought him this far.
Bellah held the conviction that religious matters were not purely intellectual, much less merely academic.
I’ve been cursed to envision peace without ever experiencing it myself.
Exploring the social and psychological costs of a life increasingly lived online.
Defenders of abortion might more wisely reframe their case around the central importance of care.
Ambivalence captures the internal nature of liberalism’s discontents.
Nouns became verbs, verbs became nouns, and both became passive and adjectival.
More disorder, more screening, more care: the familiar talking points, all dutifully repeated.
The fact is that we do not hold desire and reason together very well.
There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.
Why is Shelby Foote's Civil War subject to so much contemporary debate?
Tradition is stalked by the uncertain possibility of either faithfulness or infidelity, handing down or handing over.
Pentecostal Christianity remains oddly ignored and misunderstood.
Tillich suggested another word—and a curious one—to help interpret sin: estrangement.
What is the relationship between our conception of ultimate purpose and digital technology?
We are witnessing the ultimate emergence of tensions latent in the very foundations of the modern.
Where do the Hasidim fit in the American picture of religious liberty?
Surely among the proper responses to despair is something more like disdain, contempt, loathing, a refusal to stoop—in short, a refusal to surrender?
Are we all in an industry? What happened to “occupation”?
We have a book that seems aimed at thwarting efforts by decent humanist scholars to read Heidegger for any reason other than to condemn him.
The young will be formed. The question is how.
The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today.
Our thinking about nostalgia is badly flawed because it relies on defective assumptions about progress and time.
The historian is our most modern of all scholars.
Moyn’s Cold War liberals might rightly be called “post-Holocaust liberals.”
Criticizing modern society because it falls short of normative ideals.
All “authentic” travel becomes a kind of secular pilgrimage.
Rick Steves teaches travel as a kind of road to civic transformation.
The cases for travel are often sillier than the cases against, and I think it’s important to question them.
Travel is a way of acquiring lifetimes; travel writing, doubly so.
Augmented Reality doesn’t just add things to our perceptual experience; it redirects our attention.
A trip down the California coast has an aspect of memory and return to it.
Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind: apathy and frenzy.
It’s nice to think that a gift like that possessed by Ella Fitzgerald will always find its way. But luck matters too.
Ideologues who understand that they are consulting human-made maps will be more open to alternative interpretations when their maps conflict with reality.
The Freudian stain upon the literary imagination cannot be rinsed away. What, then, is the proper relation between psychoanalysis and literature?
John J. Lennon, incarcerated journalist, talks about education, censorship, mental health, and rehabilitation.
Today, however, most of what passes for satire does not even meet the minimum standards of being directed toward something tangible, being undertaken in reasonably good faith—and, most of all, being funny.
The case for reading Anthony Trollope begins by recognizing that he should be read because he is not of our time.
An argument that the formidable strength of right-populism in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989 is more a product of economics than of culture.
As Winter Storm Pax pushes across the eastern United States this week, I find myself pondering the power of names.
What began as one of the most popular forms of menswear has now morphed into the kindler, gentler uniform. First, there was blue collar. Then white collar. Now there’s soft collar.
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.
As the power of science grows, its dominion extends even into areas of our culture where its proclaimed authority is questionable.
Faulkner’s treatment of the past means much for the nature of our future.
Mother Nature sees you not as a soul shimmering with intelligence but as one solution to the problem of metabolism.
The gap between our concepts of love and justice has served us poorly.
A trick that only the most gifted demagogues can bring off.
One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs.
When I give myself over to the self-writers I love most, I am transformed.
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?
We are here to ponder the longue durée of mutton in an age of capitalist wolves.
Because this cannot be ignored. And because it may be prologue to the future.
Cognitive wellness culture proposes to curate our attention so that we can better spend it.
We can learn from the outdated Western Civ model, even as we transcend it.
Jean-Luc Godard, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is worth paying attention to even when we think his work is bad
It seems that neo-paganism is attractive in part because it offers an identity to those who have rejected postmodern, deracinated versions of Christianity.
What makes this so difficult is that time has a way of eroding the power of words.
The central truths revealed to me by psilocybin were all the things my mother tried to teach me.
Does the Meta-Birkin seriously compromise consumers’ ability to separate the NFT from the real Hermès bag?
What to become? Dissident or emigrant? Move abroad?
No one works in Rajneeshpuram. They “worship.” Worship includes grading roads, plowing fields, pursuing the many lawsuits brought by Bhagwan in Oregon.
Cormac McCarthy is provoking us more than we may realize.
Kundera chose to take the long view, reflecting on the relationship between the Jews and Europe, and, more broadly, on the Jews and that European, literary spirit to which he saw himself heir.
Dick Allen faced racist taunts and boos so numerous and unrelenting that he became the first player in baseball to wear his batting helmet out in the field.
Camus embodied an existence that was itself conflicted, caught between the vectors of history and lived experience.
As he roamed the edges of Lake Como, Romano Guardini foresaw the birth of a new world.
By affirming one side and suppressing the other, we make ourselves into half men and half women.
Every country needs triangulation in order to achieve self-understanding and prudent decision-making.