Richard Hanania is a political scientist and author not nearly as famous as Steven Pinker, whose ambition as a public intellectual has taken him well beyond the banalities of his initial field of study: human cognition and language. Even before the official end of America’s “forever wars,”...
Everyone has a personal relationship with YouTube. That’s just the way YouTube works. It is literally the platform that gives you what you — uniquely you and nobody else — want. It “understands” your tastes and needs. Understanding means gauging your unconscious reflexes in a...
“The Elizabeth Taylor who’s famous, the one on film, really has no depth or meaning to me,” the Hollywood icon told Life magazine’s Richard Meryman in 1964. “She’s a totally superficial working thing, a commodity. I really don’t know what the ingredients of the image are exactly —...
Many will remember 2020 as the year of COVID-19, an invisible pestilence that is still haunting the world a full year after its outbreak in the form of a global pandemic. Though it is still rather early, 2021 may one day be remembered as the year of an unexpected financial epidemic, the craze for...
According to Alex Ross in his book, “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music,” Richard Wagner was more than the composer who dominated German music in the second half of the 19th century. He became a towering cultural icon who transformed the way culturally influential people and...
The brief time between UC Berkeley and full-time employment as a software engineer would be the only moment to nourish a sense of moral curiosity that had been bruised and underfed in university. Commitment to a structure and its rules and a dedication from coding illiteracy to a CS degree from UC...
Naomi Wolf joins FO Talks to present her new book, "Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love," and the enormous outrage she experienced on social media over historical controversies in the book.
