Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:
On the evening of Dec. 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt was sitting in her living room on Riverside Drive in Manhattan when she suddenly slumped over in the presence of her dinner guests. Less than two months before, she had celebrated her 69th birthday; now, she was dead from a heart attack. Arendt certainly had her share of readers and admirers, but as one of her contemporaries later put it, at the time of her death “she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker.”
In the decades since, Arendt has become such a revered figure that it can be hard to recall how controversial she was during her lifetime. The historian Tony Judt, writing in 1995, noted her “curious and divided legacy.” Arendt specialized in the big political questions that would naturally preoccupy a German Jew who had fled Europe during World War II — totalitarianism, violence, the problem of evil. Some of her Anglo-American critics dismissed her as too, well, European. Arendt preferred “metaphysical musings upon modernity” (Judt’s words) to the empirical data that has long been an obsession of American political scientists. But for Arendt’s admirers, the United States was in dire need of such “metaphysical musings.” They saw her as a teller of hard truths: someone who could teach a self-identified liberal democracy, flush with confidence in its superiority and resilience, about the modern ills it too often tried to ignore.
More here.
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Complex ideas often require conditions and qualifiers to remain true. When these ideas are rounded off to something simpler (as always happens when ideas spread), the effects vary: Sometimes, a concept rounds to a simplification that still pushes beliefs toward truth.
Plurality voting is notorious for producing winners 
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It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable. This familiarity, as Elizabeth Goldring notes at the outset of her superb and ground-breaking biography, means it is harder to appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them. They marvelled, even more than we do, at Holbein’s ability to make viewers feel that they have been ‘granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings, that Holbein has distilled the essence of the sitter’s nature and temperament in visual form’.
Theoretical physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that modern science has become trapped in a framework that mistakes matter for the whole of reality. In this wide-ranging interview, Gómez-Marín challenges the foundations of materialism, defends the scientific study of near-death experiences, and calls for a new type of science grounded in mystery and a renewed sense of the sacred. He suggests that abandoning materialism could open the door to a deeper understanding of consciousness, death, and the purpose of human existence.
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The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine again—the Germans were coming from one direction, the Russians from another—then Lithuania. By the summer of 1940, he was back in Warsaw. There, he participated in various underground activities, including the sheltering and transportation of Jews. In 1944, he was captured and briefly held in an internment camp. As the Red Army moved closer to Warsaw and the Nazis burned the city in anticipatory vengeance, Miłosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, made their way to a village near Kraków, finding a brief respite from history, though not from poverty. Then: