Writings on Lonelines
"Total Loneliness: Hannah Arendt and the Foundations of Totalitarianism"
forthcoming in the Cahiers Edition of Hannah Arendt.
Solitude and the Activity of Thinking
in Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, ed. Roger Berkowitz, Jeff Katz, and Thomas Keenan (2009)
“The true predicaments of our time.” Hannah Arendt wrote, “will assume their authentic form only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” The totalitarianisms in Germany and the Soviet Union were only symptoms of these true predicaments, of what Arendt early on calls the mass society characterized by “organized loneliness.” Later, covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she would come to see that the bond between totalitarianism and loneliness is the phenomena of thoughtlessness.
View the full PDF here.
"Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting the Origins of Totalitarianism"
"Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting the Origins of Totalitarianism,"in Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2017.
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Lost in the Loneliness of Anti-Social Networks
The Fortnightly Review, (2011). Review of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
THE UNMANNED DRONES DROPPING laser-guided bombs in Pakistan do what they are told. But now the military is pursuing ethically programmed robots that could make autonomous decisions about when and when not to fire. As roboethicist Ronald Arkin has argued, these robots might very well act more humanely than humans.
Read the full article here.
Lonely Thinking: Hannah Arendt on Film
In 1963, The New Yorker published five articles on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi chief of Bureau IV-B-4, a Gestapo division in charge of “Jewish Affairs.” Written by political thinker and Jewish activist Hannah Arendt, the articles and ensuing book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, unleashed what Irving Howe called a “civil war” among New York intellectuals.
Read the rest of my review of "Hannah Arendt" in The Paris Review. Here.