Archive for 2010

Moral philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah outlines how shameful practices (dueling, slavery, foot-binding, war) get stopped.

The Pakistan Problem, says one of its leading public citizens, is (a) hugely threatening and (b) largely the fruit of US policy.

Barack Obama's mind, under James Kloppenberg's close reading, reveals the power and the perils of philosophical Pragmatism.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, a star of the Pakistani literary boom in the English-speaking world, speaks as only a novelist can of a country in deep, dangerous trouble.

Noam Chomsky, after all these years, retains the power to shock, with what sounds like good news in this conversation: it's his conviction that anti-war understanding and feeling run much deeper and stronger today than ever before in American history.

Peter Balakian, poet and historian of the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915, goes back to ancient Ur, and forward to 9.11 New York, in his new long lyric on catastrophe: "Ziggurat."

V. S. Naipaul brings the "gloomy clarity" of his inquisitorial eye to Africa for the last time -- this time unearthing the "forest belief" under the imported religions, Islam and Christianity.

Kevin Kelly, the WIRED magazine philosopher, sees technology evolving with a life of its own now, taking on attributes of God.

Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian of the American Revolution, sees more religion than politics (and no historical sense) in the Tea Party of 2010.