Rediscovering “Third Place” Friendships in a Post-Pandemic World
The Center - “By taking part in ordinary activities like visiting a bar or restaurant or a park or library, we are doing something which is important to the health of our neighbors, neighborhoods, and communities.” 4/15/2022

The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens
Criticism - “Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.” 4/14/2022

Review: Michael Millerman’s “Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political”
The Left - “However, its veneration of far-right thinking (sometimes qualified but always in the most intellectualized vein) undermines its claims to genuine seriousness.” 4/13/2022

Yemen and the Weaponization of Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid
The Center - “A country on the brink well before war arrived, Yemen’s humanitarian crisis has been labeled the worst of our generation.” 4/12/2022

Review: Bruce Clark’s “Athens: City of Wisdom”
Criticism - “Athens: City of Wisdom is a tour through over 3,000 years of the history of a city that has such imaginative sway and spiritual power over the hearts and minds of so many people around the world today.” 4/8/2022

The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States
The Center - “What accounts for the gap between scholars and activists who advocate reparations and broad public resistance to the idea?” 4/7/2022

The Pandemic and the Scientific Gnostics
The Right - “As Deneen says, Voegelin ‘argued that modern Gnosticism was an effort to ‘redivinize’ the political world—not now by bringing the gods in to the service of the city, but by making the city into a heaven on earth.'” 4/1/2022

Nuclear Iran—Why the Islamic Republic Is Not the Actor We Think It Is
The Center - “As the only Western journalist allowed to enter Iran prior to its presidential elections back in 2017, I followed then-candidate Ebrahim Raisi on the campaign trail. Whatever illusions I had about Iran and its ambitions melted under the sheer brutality of his war rhetoric.” 3/30/2022

Blame Putin, Sure, But Also Blame Biden
The Center - “The fact—one that should surprise no one—is that the same folks who gave us the grossly mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan have also taught a master class on how to bungle our crucial relationship with an already insecure nuclear superpower.” 3/29/2022

A Better Way to Promote Equality of Opportunity Through Education
The Center - “Now is no time to double down on a crumbling status quo. Instead of universalizing college and directing young people through a single pathway to opportunity, we should be multiplying pathways to opportunity.” 3/28/2022
