“Similarly distinct from the regular life-world is the world of academic theory, in which, as in the fantasy world, theoretical constructs are often divorced from any dependency on practical outcomes.”
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Our Life-World, Its Enemies, and the Enduring Power of Common Sense
A Three-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
“As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on the White House lawn in 1993 during the Oslo Accords, the progenitor initiative of what is required exactly now: ‘Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”
Start Making Sense: “Say Hello to Metamodernism”
“Just as [Greg] Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.”
What Europeans Don’t Understand about Trump
“Those Europeans who shake their heads in disbelief at President-elect Trump and his success would do well to consider things, including themselves, from an American and, even more so, a global point of view.”
At Home in the War
“At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home.”
These People All Know Each Other
“Charles Krauthammer used to pride himself on not going to cocktail parties, instead preferring to be at home with his wife quietly reading, writing, doing whatever. And he was probably better for it.”
Winds of the Great Shame
“And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind.”
What Europe Can Learn from the American Election
“[Make Europe Great Again] does not mean we should emulate President-elect Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement; rather, it highlights the need to recognize the importance of economic and social stability and security to ordinary people.”
Blues Run the Game
“Jackson C. Frank didn’t find what he was looking for in his own life, it doesn’t seem, though it may have become increasingly out of his control. He would be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which hardly partnered well with his pre-existing depression.”
Why We Should Still Read Charles Bukowski
“The author of this essay is the proud owner of 25 books, poetry collections, and short story anthologies written by the man widely recognized as the godfather of the literary movement known as ‘dirty realism.'”
America’s Return to Industrial Policy
“Clearly, industrial policy—the deliberate and coordinated governmental support of industries—is coming back, even if it is not clear yet where it will end up.”
You Can (and Perhaps Should) Repeat Yourself
“And, relatedly, one also begins to wonder if there are certain ways of phrasing the key points that have already been formulated, capture them perfectly, and, thus, cannot really be improved upon.”
America’s Housing Dilemma: Building for a Future with Fewer People
“Bringing this back to the United States: While we need to address our current housing crisis, the goal should not be to build, build, build anywhere at any cost.”
Why Transhumanism Is Unrealistic and Immoral
“Utopians often produce evil because their movement’s aspirations become paramount—that is, more important than avoiding acts ‘traditionally perceived as immoral.’ If enough people follow Istvan on the transhuman roller coaster, people could eventually get hurt.”
Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” in Modern New York
“The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense [MacIntyre] turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language.”