G.S.: I think that idea of an “inevitable occurrence” is probably demonstrably true by logic, if you look at eternity. But it’s very uncomfortable. And you can’t live like that. I think basically we all live with both those ideas alive in us all the time. So for example, when somebody offends you, part of […]
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Habermas’s second great work, at least judged by the number of critiques and graduate-school syllabi it inspired, was 1981’s Theory of Communicative Action, in which he once again sought to find the appropriate conditions for a truly democratic public sphere. He did so through the notion of what became known as “deliberative democracy,” which he posited […]
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Zora Neale Hurston remains one of America’s best-known authors. Charles Henry Turner developed landmark studies about the behavior of bees and spiders. Brian Wilson founded the Beach Boys. George Nissen invented the trampoline. What do they all have in common? Well, for one thing, they were all innovative Americans — creators and discoverers, producing work […]
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In his next act, Cowley chaperoned two counterculturists into the club. In a delicate yearslong dance, in 1957 Cowley persuaded Viking to take a chance on the seemingly formless and definitely obscene travelogue On the Road, by a vagabond named Jack Kerouac, which Howard counts as Cowley’s most significant achievement. Five years later, he plucked […]
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Olympic figure skating looks effortless. Athletes sail across the ice, then soar into the air, spinning like a top, before landing on a single blade just 4-5 millimeters wide. To help figure skaters land quadruple axels, Salchows, Lutzes, and maybe even the elusive quintuple without looking the least bit stressed, Jerry Lu MFin ’24 developed […]
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James Baldwin was a prodigy. That is not the first thing most people associate with a writer who once declared that he “had no childhood” and whose work often elides the details of his early life in New York, in the 1920s and 1930s. Still, by the time Baldwin was 14, he was a successful […]
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