Megan Marz
A Nicely Situated Ideal | On the Public Sphere
Edward Ongweso Jr, Ege Yumuşak, Erik Baker, Ismail Ibrahim, Megan Marz, Noelle Bodick, Sam Adler-Bell, Sarah Brouillette, Tarpley Hitt
When the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died in mid-March, the contentious debates about his ideas and influence that had stalked his career reappeared in posthumous assessments. Some recognized Habermas’s role in keeping Frankfurt School critical theory alive and defending the values of “democratically organized social life,” as Matt McManus wrote in Jacobin, against reactionaries. Others condemned Habermas’s own rightward drift, especially his “long history of being deliberately unquestioning of Israel,”...
The Return to Orality
Megan Marz
Everywhere we read that we are illiterate. On Substack, Abundance coauthor Derek Thompson laments the “handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality,” a “return” to the world as it was before the invention of writing enabled us to hold ideas at a distance and pin them down. He fears that this power of abstraction — which opened the way for science, philosophy, and much more —...
