<\/a>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.<\/p>\nTonight at the glorious Brooklyn Academy of Music, I got to see a screening of Astra Taylor’s (of Zizek!<\/em> fame) new film, The Examined Life<\/em>, in which she casts some of today’s most attention-getting philosophers as noble peripatetics\u2014and most of them on the streets and in the parks of New York City. Cornel West, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum. Yes, Zizek too. Peter Singer, who’s in the film, came to participate in the most bizarre Q&A I’ve ever experienced (two conversations at once, one audience member talking half the time, don’t ask). The movie wasn’t out of this world, but it was extremely good. Visually, it’s incredibly clever and beautiful and the soundtrack is perfect. Through sounds and images, it exposes us to the ideas and personal ticks of some incredible thinkers. Kwame Anthony Appiah has never looked so good as posed in front of elevators in JFK Airport (and, thanks to this city, I’ve seen him in person twice in the last month). The theater at BAM was packed with mostly young people really engaged with what was going on.<\/p>\nSo while I was sitting there remarking at how maybe philosophy has become somehow cool, I had to ask: Which philosophy? [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[86,54,70,31,58,69],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-celebrity","tag-conversation","tag-music","tag-new-york-city","tag-responsibility","tag-utopia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1237,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions\/1237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}