James Baldwin in The New Yorker (1962):
In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white. But white men with far more political power than that possessed by the Nation of Islam movement have been advocating exactly this, in effect, for generations. If this sentiment is honored when it falls from the lips of Senator Byrd, then there is no reason it should not be honored when it falls from the lips of Malcolm X. And any Congressional committee wishing to investigate the latter must also be willing to investigate the former. They are expressing exactly the same sentiments and represent exactly the same danger. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that white people are better equipped to frame the laws by which I am to be governed than I am. It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.
More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be devoted to Black History Month: A century of Black History Commemorations)
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FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN TURNED FORTY-NINE WHILE HIDING FROM THE FBI IN THE SPRING OF 1970, though pictures from that time suggest the playfulness of a younger man. In shots taken by civil rights movement photographer Bob Fitch, Berrigan mugs at the camera from under a rat’s-nest wig and sombrero, a lampoon of disguise. Beanie-clad, he grins in a parking lot while holding a Coke, takes a comically large step in sparse woods, smiles in a daylit diner booth at someone out of frame. At Cornell University’s Freedom Seder, part of a multiday festival thrown in his honor, he flashes a peace sign from the stage, sunglasses pointlessly and conspicuously on. He’d planned to surrender himself there, then decided not to, and escaped.
“My dear Fitz, Ain’t I a beast for not answering you before? Not that I am going to write to you now,” the 1847 letter begins. “My Book is out and I hate it and so no doubt will you.” It’s signed, “A. Tennyson.”
According to popular perception, universities have become cesspools of radical left-wing indoctrination, dominated by cultural Marxism, critical race theory, and post-modernism. As someone who has been working on the inside through the past three decades of intellectual fads and enthusiasms, I am sorry to report that, not only is this false, it is the opposite of true. The hegemonic ideology in the fields of political philosophy, legal theory, and political science, throughout my entire career, has been American liberalism. And not just any old American liberalism, but rather the very specific manifestation of this tradition articulated in the work of John Rawls.
Akeel Bilgrami, the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, is a public intellectual and a distinctive voice in contemporary philosophy. His four books (Belief & Meaning; Self-Knowledge and Resentment; Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment; and Capital, Culture, and the Commons) and many published papers testify to his ability to forge within a single, coherent framework, analytic epistemology, moral psychology, and a critical and constructive political philosophy that is deeply informed by history and political economy. In this email interview, he reflects on issues that are deeply relevant not just to India but across the world.
Today is the day that abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass chose to celebrate as his birthday. Those born into slavery, as Douglass was, were of course never told their actual birthdays; masters hardly considered such a thing worth remembering. But Douglass later recalled that the last time he had seen his mother was at the age of 7, on an occasion when she had given him a heart-shaped ginger cake to eat, and had called him her “Valentine.” Since she lived on a distant plantation—slave masters typically separated mothers and children as soon as possible, in order to maintain their dominance—it must have been a long walk for her to visit him, he surmised. Thus it must have been a special occasion; perhaps his birthday. Thus he decided to celebrate February 14.
Frederick Douglass sits in the pantheon of Black history figures. Born into slavery, he made a daring escape North, wrote best-selling autobiographies and went on to become one of the nation’s most powerful voices against human bondage. He stands as the most influential civil and human rights advocate of the 19th century. Perhaps his greatest legacy? He never shied away from hard truths.
When inequality is too vast to last, it doesn’t. The skyrocketing valuations of Big Tech and the staggering concentration of wealth accruing to its titans only presage a revolt against the depredations of disparity.
The pace of progress in the field has picked up dramatically, 
A ray of hope is emerging in American education.
RECENTLY, THERE HAS been renewed scholarly interest in reassessing modernism. Several edited anthologies have been published this decade—Stephen J. Ross and Alys Moody’s Global Modernists on Modernism (2020), Douglas Mao’s The New Modernist Studies (2021), Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers’s The New Modernist Studies Reader (2021), the renowned Bloomsbury series Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism, and Penn State University Press’s series Refiguring Modernism, to name a few. Terry Eagleton’s newest book, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis (2025), rides the wave of this renewed interest. The book is written in the author’s typically witty style, offering a reader-friendly introduction to—and vivid account of—modernism, not only in literature but also in all of its cultural dimensions. The word “literature” in the subtitle is thus misleading as the book goes well beyond that, engaging a range of debates about “crisis” at the beginning of the 20th century.
At the time of its initial publication in Spanish, José Donoso’s extravagantly grotesque novel The Obscene Bird of Night seemed to lend itself to a primarily political interpretation. It was 1970, and his native Chile was in the throes of the election campaign that resulted that September in the victory of Salvador Allende, the country’s first socialist president, and a sweeping effort to reorder its social and economic structures. Donoso’s novel read easily then as a deliberately outlandish allegory of the centuries of exploitation and oppression that were fueling Allende’s rise, and by the time the book appeared in English in 1973, the situation in Chile had cemented that impression: Allende and the transformation he sought were being besieged by the forces of reaction, and General Augusto Pinochet was soon to launch his bloody coup.
2026 marks a century of national commemorations of Black history. Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson, George Cleveland Hall, William B. Hartgrove, Jesse E. Moorland, Alexander L. Jackson, and James E. Stamps institutionalized the teaching, study, dissemination, and commemoration of Black history when they founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) on September 9, 1915.