Tag: conversation
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Revolution by Religion
I’ve got a new review in The American Prospect of two books published by Yale University Press on the same day last month, both rejoinders to the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc.): Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution and David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. Only Nixon could go to China, so perhaps it…
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Agency as a Vocation
New on the website of the Social Science Research Council, the interview I did last winter with David Kyuman Kim, a philosopher of religion who grapples with political agency, race, identity, and virtue. He’s also an incredibly gracious person who I’ve been very priviledged to work with at the SSRC. Central to both his work…
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The Examined Life Is Good
Sometimes I wish I were somewhere else. Who doesn’t? On a beach, maybe (done that). Or at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Obama says the action is now. But on some days, my goodness, New York is pretty hard to beat. Tonight at the glorious Brooklyn Academy of Music, I got to see…
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A Civilized Conversation about Militarism
“As a nation we’re waking up from a national drunk,” said Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks at CUNY Graduate Center tonight. Together with the SSRC’s Alex de Waal and retired General Barry McCaffrey, he spoke on “Military Power”—inevitably, the holy trinity of the last decade’s foreign policy disasters: Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur. Early in the…
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Environmentalism as a Politics of Fear
My friend Bryan and I have been engaged in a discussion for several weeks now about the politics of environmentalism and the prospect of climate change. We are both of a rather ascetic bent, at heart—the sense that the only way forward for the human community is a simpler existence made of nonviolence, plant-eating, and…
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We Buy Conversation
If a couple’a stubble-faced young guys came up to you on the street waving dollar bills and shouting that they wanted to buy your conversation or a secret you’ve never told anyone, what would you do? Today, at Bryant Park in Manhattan, that was Andrew Marantz, Ben Brown, and me. We were the New York…
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Questions for Mark Lilla
The Social Science Research Council has just posted on its website an interview I did with Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia and, most recently, author of The Stillborn God. We had a most pleasant conversation. In particular, I asked about his experience of the discussion about his book on the SSRC’s blog, The…
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Reading Everything (and More)
Reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ at once reminds me why I write in the first place while also being so good as to tempt me to give up and quit trying. The book tells the story, starting with the Greeks, of how Cantor ended up developing a set…
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Summarizing Jordan
At breakfast overlooking Jordan’s gorgeous Wadi Dhana nature preserve, my companion Mary and I got to talking with an Australian family in the middle of a several months’ tour across the world. The father, an environmental scientist, asked if we had any books in English to swap. He just finished what he had been reading,…