“This is the thing about moral panics—while threatening, they can be illuminating.”
Why Cancel Culture Won’t Last
Related Articles
Category: The Center
Blackface: When Nuance Meets Taboo
“One of the first lessons my students of undergraduate literary studies learn about text analysis is to distinguish between internal and external communication.”
How We Can Finally Put the Reparations Question Behind Us
“With that in mind, what I want to do below is to advance a proposal that, I think, lets everyone concerned out of this conundrum gracefully.”
Innocence, Guilt, and Living with a Disability
“This puts me in a strange position as someone who can be unequivocally categorized as a victim and yet who has always had a difficult time seeing myself as one.”
Psychologist Dr. Katherine Kinzler: the Role of Speech in Polarized Times
“In polarized times, think of the other person as an individual and not member of the other group.”
Leave Lincoln’s Statues Alone but Engage with His Legacy More Critically
“Indeed, Michael Scharf reports that ‘Milošević saw himself as a modern-day Abe Lincoln, employing force in a valiant effort to hold his crumbling Yugoslavia together.’”
How Sam Harris Changed My Opinion of Jordan Peterson
“This is why Peterson genuinely believes in Dostoevsky’s eminent saying in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Without God all things are permitted.'”
What “The Merchant of Venice” Has to Say about Justice
“Just as it was in Shakespeare’s time, the questions of justice, mercy, and society remain as relevant as ever before, and we have much to learn from the great bard of Anglodom.”
Jorge Luis Borges and the Philosophy of Memory
“For this reason, Borges’ short story reveals that the human mind is intelligent precisely because it does not recollect too much.”
The Harper’s Letter: When the Boring Becomes Incendiary
“Since the response to the letter was far from boring, two things can be asserted. First, a growing minority no longer believes free speech to be valuable. Secondly, those who do believe in free speech no longer believe that it is fully operational.
The Land of Lost Content
“As we move forward in the present struggle, where the question of race and religion becomes an endemic part of our theaters of division, we must strive to reject the retributive impulse and embrace what Martha Nussbaum keenly called the ‘rational faith.’”
James Lindsay: How Critical Studies Led to Today’s Turmoil
“This is an attempt at a social, cultural, and political revolution.”
Synecdoche, New York and Synecdoche, Croatia
“Something very similar—and, only slightly less surreal—is currently happening in the Republic of Croatia.”
The Pernicious Influence of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Sophistry
“In one of the great exercises of academic sophistry in our times, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva wants to persuade us that color-blindness is racism, and color-consciousness is anti-racism.”
What Is the “Real Deal” at Jordan Peterson’s Thinkspot?
“However, in this piece, I will explain precisely why Thinkspot was created. The story starts shortly after the turn of the millennium, with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.”