Debates

The conditions that produce the terrifying curse of totalitarianism seem to be upon us and are increasingly visible in President Trump’s denial of civil liberties, the stoking of fear in …
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Three weeks ago, the British artist and writer Hannah Black published an open letter to the curators and staff of the Whitney Biennial demanding that Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket …
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Adorno’s dictum – ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ – sounds a cautionary note for the socially-engaged writer. Against the impulse to respond with the tools of our trade, …
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“If you have the truth, keep it to yourselves.“ -Fernando Pessoa

The old traditional truth was dogmatic and fundamentalist, one that always came out unscathed and that made itself inaccessible to …
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Adolf Hitler mastered the skill of deceiving people by telling the right story to the right person at the right time –– he was a deceiver-in-chief who fooled countless people about …
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Almost everyone who reads this article is a critic, a sceptic perhaps even a cynic. Not sure? Are you gullible? Ideological? Blinkered? Of course not. We do not think of …
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It might be normal to imagine that a good society would be one in which a majority of people held optimistic views about themselves, their fellow citizens and their prospects …
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It is possible to narrate the history of debt (and, therefore, of credit) as a history of relation. This does not mean turning a blind eye to all the uses …
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It is often presumed that intellectuals have little or no political power. Perched in a privileged ivory tower, disconnected from the real world, embroiled in meaningless academic debates over specialized …
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Among the PC reproaches to Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, the one that stands out for its sheer stupidity was that there are no gay couples in the film which …
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