I recently heard about a conversation in which someone invoked the idea of a “voodoo doll,” and another in which someone said that the Chinese character for crisis also means “opportunity.” These phrases rest on falsehoods. Sticking needles into effigies to harm real enemies derives from Western European folklore. A widow was “accused, tried and […]
I read a lot of Naipaul in my youth and see value in his work. But Ian Buruma’s obituary profile reminds me of the main way in which I disagreed with him. Naipaul believed there were “whole cultures”: comprehensive, harmonious, indigenous, and hermetic. Examples included classical India, England, and pre-colonial West Africa. A whole culture […]
The political theorists Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick make the political case against Hamilton, the musical. In the debates among the founders, Alexander Hamilton was the elitist, the one with the most “contemptuous attitude toward the lower classes.” He was “perfectly comfortable with the inegalitarian and antidemocratic implications of his economic vision.” As friends have noted, […]
While visiting the excellent Tufts University Art Gallery exhibition, “Tseng Kwong-Chi: Performing for the Camera,” my colleagues and I heard the following story. Tseng was the child of Chinese anticommunist refugees. He moved to the East Village in the 1970s, where he worked and played with people like Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. When his parents visited from their home […]
(Phoenix, AZ) In my forays into social science (I am trained as a philosopher), I tend to read and write about variables that can be attributed to individual human beings. Individuals vote or don’t, they graduate from high school or drop out, they live in Massachusetts or Texas, they support or oppose health care reform. […]