Gratitude/2
For my teacher Marc H. Ellis who gave me apt advice when I nervously started started teaching in 1997: “Don’t worry about what the students give to you. Just give everything you’ve got to your…
Category: Intellectuals
The Chutzpah!
[Thomas] Sowell’s habit of challenging liberal orthodoxies that are held dear by most of his fellow intellectuals and the mainstream media has led to a good deal of criticism over the decades. This book explores…
Intellectual Superiority Complex
Ivan Karamazov has lost his faith precisely because he has elevated himself above the people. In this case, “the people” are not necessarily peasants, but are what Ivan, a modern intellectual, is not: human beings…
Who of Us Born Here Could Say This?
I loved the Constitution and could recite many of its provisions from memory. –Raul Hilberg, born in Austria, author of The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian
Sharing Her Wealth
[Simone Weil] continued giving her comrades her lucid and sad reflections, completely free of the blur of opinion, clear of the complacency of illusion, and untouched by the concerns of personal ambition. –Gabriella Fiori, Simone Weil:…
What Simone Weil Wrote about School Studies
… the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. … All tasks that really call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reason…
A Healing Pleasure
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or…
Come Gather ’round, Scholars, Whatever You Tweet…
M. had yet to learn the distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Up to this time his conception had been that one got knowledge from books and schools. Later on he gave up that false conception….
When Life Starts to Improve
Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…
Problematizing My Faves: Matt Taibbi on Howard Zinn
The worst thing is to claim to be objective. Of course, you can’t be. Historians should say what their values are, what they care about, what their background is, and let you know what is…