You’ve got to love a country where the President commutes the death sentences of 37 death row inmates, is widely praised for it, makes a pious speech about why the other three have to get the shaft for “terrorism,” and then, without a pause, continues committing genocide abroad while winning adulation for that. The part of the country fixated on the first part of that sentence is incomprehensible to the part fixated on the second, and vice versa. The day when the second group becomes large enough to be a real worry to the first is the day that we’ll witness the beginning of the end of the United States of America in the name of something better. It’s only when you grasp that the second group unapologetically wants to hasten that day that you’ll understand what the dispute was about in the first place. But believe me, we do.
Category Archives: Memorials and Obituaries
Dreaming 9/11
From a journal entry I wrote on the morning of September 10, 2021:
I just woke up from a dream in which I went to the Taliban’s Afghanistan to “see what would happen.” Ten minutes into the dream, I get apprehended and set up for interrogation and torture. Predominant feeling is disappointment at how dumb, sadistic, and unreligious my captor is, as though I was expecting a Taliban interrogation to be an academic seminar on the pros and cons of theocracy led by a latter-day Abul Ala’ Mawdudi rather than a torture session led by a bunch of illiterate psychopaths. (As it happens, Mawdudi was my father’s Arabic teacher in real life. Was Freud right? Are all dreams about wish fulfillment?)
Thinking 9/11
In 2021, on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, NJ.com asked its readers how they intended to “commemorate the 20th anniversary.” Here’s the answer I gave. I’d forgotten it until Facebook called it up today as a “memory.” I think it holds good today, about 9/11, about 10/7, and about much else that for lack of a better word, we “commemorate.” Continue reading
American Light
I wanted to note the passing of John Wilmerding (1938-2024), for many years the Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University. He died on June 6 of this year at the age of 86.
I didn’t really know Wilmerding at all–never met him, never really took a class with him. He was the guest lecturer for the week-long section on American art in my college-level art history class, Art 100, “An Introduction to the History of Art”–the closest to physical contact I ever got. But more than anyone, I owe Wilmerding credit for my decades’- long love affair with American art, and in particular, American landscape and maritime painting of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Continue reading
Michael Sugrue (1957-2024), RIP
I was pained to read of the untimely death of philosopher Michael Sugrue, most recently of Ave Maria University, but for twelve years a lecturer in political philosophy at Princeton. He was 66.
I met Sugrue sometime in 2002 when I was living in Princeton and trying, with conspicuously little success, to make ends meet and get my dissertation done. I applied in late 2001 for an adjunct job at Princeton, and got a position as teaching assistant for Sugrue’s POL 307, “The Just Society,” a standard survey course in political philosophy–the first half devoted to classic works, the second to contemporary ones. Continue reading
Fr. David B. Burrell, CSC (1933-2023), RIP
I was saddened to read of the passing of Fr. David Burrell, CSC, Hesburgh Professor of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He passed away on Sunday, October 1st. I knew Fr. Burrell when I was a grad student at Notre Dame in the 1990s, but regrettably never took a class with him, and have only recently–decades after the fact–come to understand and appreciate his work. Continue reading
The Lessons of 9/11: Twenty-Two Years Later
I post this every year around 9/11 (have done so since 2014), so here it is again with some revisions. I seem to have neglected to post it last year, and have not yet had the chance to add anything specific to the Ukraine War or proxy war more generally. But some of the implications should be obvious enough.
Today is the twenty-second anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from two decades of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples, but I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own.
Continue readingFailing the Empathy Exams
The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true.
–Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” The Empathy Exams*
On the day before New Year’s back in 2021, I found myself riding the train to work when, one stop after mine, a vaguely familiar woman got on. Or maybe I should say, struggled on. She was, I guess, in her sixties, heavy-set, apparently in pain, though not from any obvious cause, and was struggling with a shopping cart full of possessions. At first, in a reflexive reaction to the shopping cart, I took her to be a homeless person, but that turned out not to be the case. She clearly had trouble moving, and had trouble getting the cart onto the train. I half got up to help her, but not knowing how my gallantry would be received, sat back down and watched her struggle. It was rush hour, just before 8 am. Continue reading
Stephen Nathanson (1943-2023), RIP
I read the other day of the recent death of Stephen Nathanson, professor emeritus of philosophy at Northeastern University. I didn’t know Nathanson very well–we never met–but nonetheless wanted to note his passing.
I first encountered Nathanson’s work when I did manuscript reviews for Prentice Hall Press back in the mid-1990s. The Press assigned me a manuscript of his to review with the working title Who Gets What?, later called Economic Justice and published in their Foundations of Philosophy Series (1998). It’s a refreshingly well-written and clarifying book. When I first read the manuscript, I held a Rand-and-Nozick-influenced version of libertarianism at odds with the defense of the welfare state Nathanson offers in Economic Justice. It took me awhile, but I eventually came around to something like the view Nathanson defends, and did so partly by reflection on his arguments. I still turn to the book decades after the fact when I want to think things through on the subject. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s looking to do the same. Continue reading
Adriana Kuch (2008-2023), RIP
Stories about suicide now catch my eye more than they once did, so it’s no surprise that this story leapt out at me while reading the paper this morning: A 14-year-old high school student in Bayville, New Jersey is bullied in a school where bullying seems to be a chronic problem. She’s beaten in a school hallway by another student who has her confederates film the beating; the video is then uploaded to TikTok. The victim, thoroughly humiliated, goes home, waits a day, then kills herself.*
Confronted with the chronic nature of the bullying in the school, and the school’s equally chronic failure to respond to it, the school’s superintendent does his best to deflect. It was the girl’s fault, he says: she was a troubled drug user from a dysfunctional family; the school tried to give her drug counseling, but the family declined. And that, he says, not the bullying, is what explains her suicide. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 