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.”

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Slavoj Žižek: “Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist”

(Slavoj Žižek in 2015)

“In all other religions, you have people who become atheists. Only in Christianity, God himself goes through this experience.”

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Lord Conrad Black: Insights from the Ancient World

“There is such a thing as progress. I am no Pollyanna, and human nature doesn’t change much, but there’s undoubtedly progress.”

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Daniel A. Cox: Taking the Pulse of Gen Z

(Creative Commons)

“One of the really significant differences in terms of how young people are being raised today and their formative and teens years and previous generations is how slowly they’re reaching major milestones, such as getting married [and] owning a home, the sort of signs of adulthood…”

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Slavoj Žižek: “Freedom: A Disease Without Cure”

(Bloomsbury Press)

“So you see why people are not satisfied: I don’t propose simple solutions. In my old age, I’m returning from Marx to Hegel.”

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Richard Kemp: Israel’s Existential Campaign to Destroy Hamas

Israel Defense Forces in Gaza on November 8th (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

“Hamas wants to maximize the death of its civilian population. The purpose is to get the international community, the United Nations, the United States, other governments around the world, to condemn Israel, to vilify Israel, to delegitimize Israel, and undermine the Jewish state in that way.”

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Phyllis Chesler: Modern Feminism’s Failure to Condemn Hamas

“The feminists have deserted Jewish women. And it wasn’t just Jewish women. There were Arab Muslim women, and there were Thai Buddhist women. No doubt many Christian women or some Christian women who were also raped, murdered, and kidnapped.”

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Patrick Deneen: “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future”

“The so-called conservative movement of the 1980s was anything but conservative.”

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Matt Johnson: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left”

(Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

“There really hasn’t been anybody like him since he passed…This is why there are these long compilations of ‘Hitchslaps’ on YouTube. It’s why most of the tributes to him focus on his rhetorical prowess—and just his brilliance on the debate stage.”

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Clay Routledge: Breaking Ground in Psychology, Outside of the Academy

(Clay Routledge)

“Regulating your own emotions is something most people are capable of doing…It doesn’t require you constantly expressing [a problem], thinking about it, [and] sharing it with everyone…There’s something about not fixating too much on your own problems and really dwelling on them but, instead, doing something.”

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Waller Newell: The Characteristics of Tyranny

“We will be nothing like the way we are now. It will be like a night and day transformation. And it always does require violence because, as you said, that class or race enemy that stands in the way of future bliss simply has to be gotten rid of.”

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Faisal Saeed Al Mutar: Iraq, 20 Years After the Fall of Baghdad

(Gilles Bassignac/ Gamma-Rapho/Getty)

“There is a lot of hope. Every time I go there and meet with the new generation, I think that they definitely want for their country to be a successful one. And that’s the conversation in Iraq. Most people have now forgotten about the war.”

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Death Is Not Inevitable: Sitting Down with Zoltan Istvan

“I’d be very surprised if a super intelligent AI a thousand years from now cannot recreate everything. Also, like so many other people, including Elon, I believe there’s probably a 50% chance we’re in a simulation. So, that would defeat the idea of death as well.”

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John Cribb: What We Can Learn from Abraham Lincoln

“All of the sudden, I was on the phone with Mike Pence… ‘I just finished Old Abe last night, and I had to track you down and tell you how much I loved it, and it’s the best book about Lincoln I’ve ever read.’ And, for ten minutes, he just wanted to talk about Lincoln.”

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Lance Morrow: “The Noise of Typewriters”

“You could read my book…as a kind of homage to the magazine.”

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