‘What is democracy.’ Um, democracy can be thought about in two distinct ways. One a banal way — which is really useful. It’s the most basic thought about democracy, and that’s that there are counter-majoritarian institutions, there are checks and balances that work. So a democracy is when you can  …

Here in the academic enclave neighborhood of southern-Chicago shoreland where I’ve been living just a few years — on multiple counts a foreigner-outsider, no doubt permanently — I got myself out to a book talk organized through an arm of the divinity school last week. There are a lot of  …

In an online venue I’ve had involvement with in recent years, an essayist addressing one of the world’s more terrifying current cases of official oppression of a people group within borders wrote something that’s been a little bit under my skin since. Can we expect or hope for now, at  …

Thanks to the YouTube feed (in my case, with judicious use, not the mere garbage-dump brain-damage engine it can easily become), I learned this week about a touring exhibit now open at the United Nations facility in New York, headlined ‘#FakeImages.’ The video is included here, below. It might have  …

“The reason what makes a media business such a riddle,” writes ex-Digiday-pres Brian Morrissey recently, “is media itself is no longer an economic function wrapped inside a corporate entity. Media, like tech, is embedded in every company and most endeavors.” (Those of us frequently guilty of worse, if no one  …

I started stripping down the front of this site a couple of months back, and I’m going to begin on the old blog here, too. Not sure yet exactly where this is going, though of course I have thoughts. But anyway the two or three of you who’ve been with  …

Iqbal went to Europe in 1905 in the steps of another beloved teacher, Thomas Walker Arnold of Government College in Lahore. Arnold was a historian of Islam and Islamic art. He was a great friend of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who had helped found a new college at Aligarh in  …

Hop down to items in latter part of this post if you prefer: Sam Aronow, ‘Jewish History’ episode on Moses Hess Bruce Gordon, course lectures on early modern Christianity, Yale Divinity Alan Brinkley, Rick Perlstein, Jackson Lears, Michael Kazin on Henry Luce’s journalism Federico Finchelstein on memory, history, and the  …