Article 9
Justin Smith-Ruiu: The risk of attempting such a thing is that one will appear unserious and will accordingly begin to lose the professional and social advantages that slowly began accumulating...
View Articlediseases of the intellect
Twenty years ago, I had an exceptionally intelligent student who was a passionate defender of and advocate for Saddam Hussein. She wanted me to denounce the American invasion of Iraq, which I was...
View Articleperiodicity
This piece from the Dispatch (possibly paywalled) on how The New York Times misled its readers with an overly “Hamas-friendly” headline makes a valid point, I guess — but I think much of the problem...
View Articlethe wayfaring mind
What follows is a talk I gave some years ago at Smith College. It weaves together some common threads in my work, and draws on some previous published stuff — for instance, the Introduction to my book...
View Articleignorance, vincible and invincible
‘Childhood has been rewired’: [Jonathan Haidt:] ‘TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over...
View Articlewhat everything costs
As long as resources are finite, any political or social policy helps some people at the expense of others. Any serious thinker will admit this and will be quite clear about who gets hurt. For...
View ArticleArticle 3
John Stuart Mill: So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as...
View Articlewords, words, words
Many of our arguments are fruitless because we don’t know the meaning of the words we use. And we don’t know the meaning of the words we use because meaning is not a property of language that our...
View ArticleLegal Sauce for the Legal Goose
From an an interview with Jill Lepore: I’m working on a long book about the history of attempts to amend the Constitution. And on the one hand, we have a Constitution that has a provision that allows...
View ArticleSilence, Violence, and the Human Condition
I don’t believe that “silence is violence,” ever. And I doubt that anyone else would either, if they were to spend a bit of time thinking about it. People remain silent when they see violence (either...
View Article
