Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Continue reading “On Wisdom and Migration, 2”But then along comes “Behold the Dreamers,” a debut novel by a young woman from Cameroon that illuminates the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse.
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Hamilton resonates because it speaks, consistently and profoundly, to a deep hunger for wisdom in American society today.
I recently had the pleasure of experiencing first-hand the life story of an “obnoxious arrogant loudmouth” whose “swagger” is “built on a bedrock of total insecurity.” Inordinately proud of his “top-notch brain” but prone to serious acts of misjudgment, this “model New Yorker” commits adultery, then pays hush money to cover his tracks. A great political scandal ensues.
Continue reading “A.Ham in the Age of Trump”This piece first appeared in Inside Higher Ed and is reprinted here with permission
“I am wiser than he is to this small extent that I do not think that I know what I do not know.”
Socrates, in Plato, The Apology of Socrates
In October of 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman delivered a lecture at West Point in which she decried the “persistence of unwisdom” among politicians across the ages. Reflecting on how American presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had embroiled the United States more deeply in the Vietnam War, Tuchman bemoaned a perennial “wooden-headedness”—a tendency for politicians to act wishfully, while not allowing themselves to be “confused by facts.”
Continue reading “Teaching for Wisdom Today”