What does (and doesn’t) work in building the better world we dream about? Why do some movements for social change succeed while others fizzle or even fail? For considering these questions, one of the most helpful resources I have found recently is the book How Change Happens by Leslie Crutchfield. She is the executive director of Georgetown University’s Global Social Enterprise Initiative. She and her team have researched some of the major recent movements for social change in the United States... Read more

On Sunday, we passed the mark of being one year away from the next U.S. presidential election, which will be held on November 3, 2020. In reflecting on the current state of our body politic, one of the most helpful resources I have found is Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s powerful and accessible book, published last year with the sobering title of How Democracies Die. Both authors are professors of government at Harvard University. For most of their careers, they have... Read more

If you were enrolled at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, one of your required courses would be Defense Against the Dark Arts. The Hogwarts Professor Severus Snape said of this subject: The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster, which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before. You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible…. Your defenses must therefore be as... Read more

I. Big History The English writer H. G. Wells (1866-1946) is best remembered for his science fiction novels—The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells was also a futurist, and his books “foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web.” In response to the horrors of the first World War, Wells similarly attempted to peer... Read more

Joy Harjo is our current United States Poet Laureate, and the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to hold the position. Harjo began writing in the early 1970s as a college student and in the decades since has published eight books of poetry, a memoir and two books for young audiences. Her latest collection, titled An American Sunrise, was published this year. Harjo has said that, “My poems are about confronting the kind of society that would diminish Native... Read more

Here’s the thing about big words such as community, peace, liberty, and justice: they mean different things to different people. And I don’t mean to be flippant or insensitive when I say that there’s a lot of truth in the saying that, “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” So much depends on one’s point of view. When speaking of justice, philosophers have classically made a distinction between distributive justice (which tends to be concerned about distributing justice, or... Read more

We are in the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days, which stretch from Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) on September to Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) on October 9. The ten days in total are also known collectively as the Days of Repentance or the Days of Awe. And the High Holy Days is an auspicious time to reflect on the life and teachings of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber for how they may be able to... Read more

Martin Hägglund (1976 – ), originally from Sweden, is a professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He opens his book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom with a poignant epigram from Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë’s only novel: If I were in heaven…I should be extremely miserable…. I dreamt, once, that I was there…. Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were... Read more

At the end of many classes and events, there is an opportunity to complete an evaluation. The questions are usually standard and unremarkable: what you liked, what might’ve been better, etc. One exception to standard evaluation fare has stuck with me more than two decades later. My favorite undergraduate philosophy professor always included an unusual question on his course evaluations: “How might this course be improved in the future other than making the professor 20% smarter?” When we asked him... Read more

Among anthropologists, there’s a classic story about a western missionary meeting an indigenous inhabitant of an island off the East coast of Australia. It was a bright, sunny day, and the missionary happened upon a man relaxing on the beach: MISSIONARY: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life way, lying around like that. MAN: Why? What do you think I should be doing? MISSIONARY: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some of the... Read more