Anastasia Berg
junior research fellow in philosophy at cambridge university; editor
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Reopen the American Mind
Nytimes.com 125d 12 tweets
In the midst of an existential crisis for higher education, is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive?
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Anastasia Berg Today in and I write about why the “crisis of the humanities” won’t be solved within the cloisters of academia alone. To live up to the mission of the humanities we must recover our trust in the public’s capacity to think. 125d
On the Hatred of Literature | The Point Magazine
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 395d 11 tweets
When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption …
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Anastasia Berg Must admit the responses to this piece remind me of the responses to ’s Hatred of Literature piece: it’s interesting in that people prefer to deny the phenomenon or its extent rather than defend it. 165d
Critical Attempts: Moishe Postone on general education
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 186d 1 tweets
"The attempt to promote critical awareness flies in the face of vocational education. So it’s a critical attempt. I think it could be a profoundly democratic attempt."
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Anastasia Berg I *think* we ran it first? It's a two part interview and it's grand 186d
Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?
The Chronicle of Higher Education 293d 5 tweets
Anastasia Berg, Ross Douthat, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Caitlin Zaloom discuss a contested concept.
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Anastasia Berg "I went to Harvard, and I don’t remember anything I learned in college." 🙈🙈 In February, at UNC, I spoke to , and about meritocracy. 293d
Capitalism at Dusk | The Point Magazine
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 315d 4 tweets
In today’s political climate, objections to what is generally if not very precisely called “capitalism” frequently concern the ever-widening inequalities in income that are the …
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Anastasia Berg Breaking news, breaking news: For the very first time, Robert Pippin publicly writes about Hegel, and what a Hegelian critique of capitalism would look like. ☄️🔥🔥 315d
“The Media”
The New Yorker 317d 1 tweets
Fiction by Ben Lerner: “Tonight I’m around, promoting syllables, trying to avoid the twin traps of mere procedure and sentimentalism.”
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Anastasia Berg This must be the highest honor a literary critic could receive. 👑🙌🙌 317d
Home Movies: On Obsession | The Point Magazine
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 330d 1 tweets
As a freelance film critic, I cope by allowing my already-solitary day job to merge with my relaxation time, watching movie after movie and TV show after TV show with increasingly little regard for quality or genre.
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Anastasia Berg Is the launching a new column EVERY day? Yes. Which is my favorite? I will never tell. Today, it's **MOVIES with the inimitable ** In her first column she writes about why even monomaniacal obsession hates isolation. 330d
Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness
The Chronicle of Higher Education 338d 5 tweets
The Italian philosopher’s interventions are symptomatic of theory’s collapse into paranoia.
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Anastasia Berg Did I cancel my wedding because I believe in nothing but "bare life," as Agamben would have it? In the I wrote about what it is we are really sacrificing our pleasures and freedoms for. 338d
Parenting and Panic | The Point Magazine
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 492d 7 tweets
This is the ninth in a series of columns on public philosophy by Agnes Callard; read more here. Parenting starts out lonely, because newborn babies do …
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Anastasia Berg "Even my confessions of bad parenting are carefully calculated to make you think I am actually a great parent." In her much anticipated sequel to her piece for our Children's symposium, laments the illusory promises of "parental choices." 490d
Half a Person | The Point Magazine
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 513d 1 tweets
In December 2018, I found myself unexpectedly pregnant. I have three children, the oldest of whom is in high school, and I had not planned on negotiating the difficulties of pregnancy and early childhood…
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Anastasia Berg "should I have an abortion? I discussed my predicament with a.. conference room full of philosophers at the annual Eastern APA meeting. I discovered that people—even committed pro-choicers—cannot handle this question." 513d
Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
The Chronicle of Higher Education 530d 8 tweets
Is it time for universities to rethink the definition of merit, and, more broadly, higher education’s role in American life? We put these questions to 10 scholars and administrators from across the academy.  
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Anastasia Berg For ’s forum on meritocracy and higher education I wrote about how the cultivation of responsible leadership—intellectual, cultural and above all political— would benefit from an admissions lottery. 🎰🎰🎰 530d
The Revolt of the Feminist Law Profs
The Chronicle of Higher Education 567d 31 tweets
Jeannie Suk Gersen and the fight to save Title IX from itself.  
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Anastasia Berg I see how the desire for justice can tempt one to consider suspending due process, but it's an odd irony that this desire seems to increase as the definition of wrongdoing is expanded to contain lesser and lesser offenses. for 566d
Confession is Just a Special Form of Bragging: On "Fleabag" - LARB
Los Angeles Review of Books 575d 5 tweets
Anastasia Berg considers confession and confessors from Saint Augustine to Fyodor Dostoevsky to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's "Fleabag."
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Anastasia Berg For I wrote about Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, what REALLY goes wrong in that confession scene, and why it’s better to keep some things to yourself. 575d
Kids Survey
Google Docs 587d 1 tweets
This summer, The Point, a Chicago-based magazine of politics and culture, is publishing a symposium on the question "What are children for?" Since, as one might expect, pretty much all of the symposium contributors are adults, we thought it would be...
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Anastasia Berg Do you have access to a child or several? Have you always dreamed of becoming an intrepid interviewer? Excellent! In the next issue of we ask: What Are Children For? And we need some insider knowledge! Help a child fill this survey! 587d
A Republic of Discussion: Habermas at ninety
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 617d 17 tweets
The ninetieth birthday of Jürgen Habermas, the influential social theorist and political philosopher from the second generation of the Frankfurt School, has occasioned a wave of celebratory retrospectives. In this essay by Raymond Geuss,…
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Anastasia Berg Overview: The Recent Habermas Debate to Date Geuss on Habermas Replies: Martin Jay: Seyla Benhabib: Not done yet! Geuss on Benhabib: Benhabib on Geuss: 596d
“The Liberal Idea Has Become Obsolete”: Putin, Geuss and Habermas
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 599d 4 tweets
I was first alerted to Raymond Geuss’s sour anti-commemoration of Jürgen Habermas’s ninetieth birthday, “A Republic of Discussion,” coincidentally on the same day that Vladimir Putin declared the obsolescence of liberalism in a meeting with Donald...
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Anastasia Berg Overview: The Recent Habermas Debate to Date Geuss on Habermas Replies: Martin Jay: Seyla Benhabib: Not done yet! Geuss on Benhabib: Benhabib on Geuss: 596d
Jürgen Habermas’s 90th birthday - The Hannah Arendt Center - Medium
Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College - Medium 602d 3 tweets
Raymond Guess saw fit to celebrate Jürgen Habermas’s 90th birthday with a poisoned polemic called “A Republic of Discussion. Habermas at…
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Anastasia Berg Overview: The Recent Habermas Debate to Date Geuss on Habermas Replies: Martin Jay: Seyla Benhabib: Not done yet! Geuss on Benhabib: Benhabib on Geuss: 596d
Professor Benhabib and Jürgen Habermas - The Hannah Arendt Center - Medium
Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College - Medium 596d 3 tweets
When I have been invited, I have published things on the internet, but I don’t myself regularly read anything published there. However…
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Anastasia Berg Overview: The Recent Habermas Debate to Date Geuss on Habermas Replies: Martin Jay: Seyla Benhabib: Not done yet! Geuss on Benhabib: Benhabib on Geuss: 596d
Contra Geuss: A Second Rejoinder - The Hannah Arendt Center - Medium
Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College - Medium 596d 2 tweets
As Raymond Geuss admits in his Reply, having published his initial critique of Habermas in 1981,[i] he no longer followed the work except…
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Anastasia Berg Overview: The Recent Habermas Debate to Date Geuss on Habermas Replies: Martin Jay: Seyla Benhabib: Not done yet! Geuss on Benhabib: Benhabib on Geuss: 596d
On Left Straussianism | The Point Magazine
The Point Magazine - The Point Magazine 641d 12 tweets
Nobody shares all their private complaints with an audience, but how do we know how much to share and with whom? Certainly, in the name of various kinds of shared commitments, it seems best…
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Anastasia Berg UNPAYWALLED: Letter on Left Straussianism. Should public life be exclusively dedicated to a "war of position"? and I argue that we should treat our readers not as the unthinking many, but with the same honesty and respect as we do our friends. 641d