Last week at Brooklyn College, the Wolfe Institute‘s Spring 2012 Faculty Study Group met to discuss Corey Robin‘s The Reactionary Mind, which aims to identify substantive theses central to that political tradition by way of an intellectual history of conservatism; more precisely, by close readings of some central works of the conservative canon. (The Faculty Study GroupContinue reading “Arendt and Sontag on Conservatism, Romanticism, and ‘Interesting’ Politics”
Category Archives: Books
The FBI, Elaborate Entrapment and Hannah Arendt on Secret Police
David Shipler writes in today’s New York Times about an interesting aspect of a series of ‘lethal terrorist plots’ that have been successfully interdicted by the nation’s law enforcement agencies: [These] dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicideContinue reading “The FBI, Elaborate Entrapment and Hannah Arendt on Secret Police”
Buber, Eichmann, and the Death Penalty
As part of the discussion generated by my posts on the death penalty (prompted by the Anders Behring Breivik case; here and here), my colleague, the brilliant Noson Yanofsky, wrote in to say, This reminds me of Martin Buber’s fight to keep Israel from executing Eichmann. His reasoning was not practical but moral. He lost the fightContinue reading “Buber, Eichmann, and the Death Penalty”
Video Games and Literature: Producers of Social Dysfunction?
In the December 20th 2010 issue of The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote a profile of the video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of, according to Wikipedia–“some of the most successful video game franchises of all time, including Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, F-Zero, Pikmin, and the Wii series“). In the course of that article, Paumgarten wrote that games, regardless of how much we mayContinue reading “Video Games and Literature: Producers of Social Dysfunction?”
We Robot 2012 – UAVs and a Pilot-Free World
Day Two at the We Robot 2012 conference at the University of Miami Law School. Amir Rahmani‘s presentation Micro Aerial Vehicles: Opportunity or Liability? prompted a set of thoughts sparked by the idea of planes not flown by human beings, and in turn, the idea of an aviator-free world. It has been some 109 years sinceContinue reading “We Robot 2012 – UAVs and a Pilot-Free World”
We Robot 2012 – Day One
I am posting today from the University of Miami Law School, which is staging the We Robot 2012 conference. I presented and discussed Patrick Hubbard’s (University of South Carolina Law School) Regulation of Liability for Risks of Physical Injury From “Sophisticated Robots”. Presenting someone else’s work presents a difficult challenge; thanks to being an academicContinue reading “We Robot 2012 – Day One”
Ann Patchett is Wrong About the Pulitzers
Ann Patchett has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, which waxes angsty over the failure of the Pulitzer committee to award a prize in fiction this year: This decision, besides affecting book sales, might lead readers to think there wasn’t any good fiction around. For as Patchett puts it, the Pulitzers are indispensable inContinue reading “Ann Patchett is Wrong About the Pulitzers”
‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk
In his review of Heike B. Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun (Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, Knopf, translated by Damion Searls, reviewed in The New York Review of Books, April 26 2012, Vol LIX, Number 7), Anthony Beevor notes: Hitler’s “table-talk,” a ramble of banalities and crassly sweeping judgments on history and art, recorded asContinue reading “‘A Ramble of Banalities’: Hitler’s Table-Talk”
Schopenhauer on the Pernicious Influence of Copyright on Writing
Modern debates on the ‘intellectual property’ front involve several, overlapping, recurring themes. One persistent pair of inter-related concerns is: How are creators, authors, artists, ‘content producers’, and the like to be compensated for their ‘contributions’ to our commons? and, How indispensable are the protections of the various legal regimes that are termed ‘intellectual property’ (andContinue reading “Schopenhauer on the Pernicious Influence of Copyright on Writing”
Oakeshott, the ‘Practical Past’, Ancestors, and Psychoanalysis
For Michael Oakeshott ( ‘Present, Future, and Past’, from ‘Three Essays on History’ in On History, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1999), the ‘practical past’ is: [A]n accumulation of symbolic persons, actions, utterances, situations and artefacts, the products of practical imagination, and their only significant relationship to past is not to the past to which they ambiguouslyContinue reading “Oakeshott, the ‘Practical Past’, Ancestors, and Psychoanalysis”
Samir Chopra 