Anand Giridharadas in conversation with biographer Ann Heberlein about her new book, On Love and Tyranny, The Life and Politics of Hannah Arendt, “a thinker with profound relevance to this moment.” https://the.ink/p/arendt?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta
All posts by jmp
Insurrection and Sedition
The assault of January 6 on a sitting Congress was an exclamation point at the conclusion of four bizarre years in American democracy. It was the end point of a callous campaign by the nation’s highest elected official to incite insurrection among the lunatic fringe of his core supporters. Like him, it failed, but it Read More
The Oldest Story
By choice I’ve spent most of my life among storytellers. Poets, novelists, playwrights, songwriters, and just sitting around the campfire tellers of tales. I love stories and the people who tell them. Have you ever wondered what might be the oldest story of them all? The one that’s been told longer than any other? One Read More
50 Years of Patti Smith
Highly recommend this brief, poignant interview with the artist Patti Smith as she prepares for an anniversary performance in London 50 years after her first appearance in New York City here. She’s covered a lot of ground in her time and produced some amazing work.
Holigaze
This very unusual holiday season has unsettled many a traditional gathering and left a lot of us feeling adrift. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, are all the ornaments of our collective failure as a society, those people seemingly on every corner in town, holding cardboard signs, asking for help, looking with vacant eyes at Read More
How Wide the Divide?
Turn a few sacred cows on their heads. Think about the aphorisms that support our concept of American society. The place where meritocracy determines your fate. Anybody can get ahead, right? The great gift of our free enterprise system. Competition brings out the best in us and the cream rises to the top. If you start Read More
Performance
Dramatists, directors, actors all will tell you the same thing about it: theatre is when strangers come together to share a common experience. What is so unique is the connection between artists and audience. The same could be said of all the performing arts in pre-pandemic times. What about streaming theatre? The various ways the Read More
Paying More and Getting Less
The damage done to the employment prospects of recent college graduates by the pandemic, and the litany of other 21st century disasters that preceded it, is severe. The pain is compounded by the cost of the education they pursued in good faith, only to have far fewer opportunities available to them than their parents’ generation. No Read More
Basic Income
As the pandemic of 2020 rages, a new Administration forms, and Congress lobs partisan volleys back and forth across that ever widening aisle on the Hill, we are at an inflection point of unprecedented gravity. Possibly not since the Civil War has the United States seemed so divided and likely to come apart. If ever Read More