UNCOVERED: 3 - Caught on Camera

The Zone of Interest invites us to face the Holocaust and ask: could we have done this?

Through an Auschwitz commandant’s family life, Jonathan Glazer’s chilling new film reminds us of the banality of evil, says Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian’s chief culture writer

The Guardian - UK · Feb 3, 2024

"Late Fascism": It's more than Trump

Fascism has been lurking under the surface of liberal democracy all along — we just didn't want to see it

Salon · Jan 21, 2024

Walter Benjamin's Illuminations: the remarkably prescient work of an intellectual truth-seeker

In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.

The Conversation · Jan 4, 2024

Was going to space a good idea?

In 1963, six years after the first satellite was launched, editors from the Encyclopaedia Britannica posed a question to five eminent thinkers of the day: “Has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?” The respondents were philosopher Hannah Arendt, writer Aldous Huxley, theologian Paul Tillich, nuclear scientist Harrison…

The Conversation · Dec 4, 2023

Nazi doctors weren't just ‘a few bad apples’, shows report – and simplistic stories won't help guard against future medical abuses

Extraordinary evil involves a total moral collapse across society caused by failure of individual humanity and ethical judgment. This was the conclusion of the philosopher Hannah Arendt after witnessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann – the chief architect of the Holocaust – in Jerusalem.

The Conversation · Nov 28, 2023

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch: Booker prize-winning novel is a distinctly Irish tale of civic and ideological collapse

The philosopher Hannah Arendt’s much-quoted description of the “banality of evil” could be applied to the disquieting story told in Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. The Booker prize-winning novel is a perfect study of the banality of totalitarianism.

The Conversation · Nov 27, 2023

Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and Ayn Rand all felt 'different' in the world – and changed the way we think

The “actual impulse of astonishment” that sparks all philosophising is “honest bafflement that other people live as they do,” writes Wolfram Eilenberger in his new book, The Visionaries.

The Conversation · Nov 26, 2023

Is it time to reconsider the idea of 'the banality of evil'?

After attending the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt claimed what was terrifying about this man was not his moral monstrosity. It was his sheer normality. She subtitled her 1963 book on the subject, Eichmann in Jerusalem, “a report on the…

The Conversation · Nov 22, 2023

Feeding the insatiable MAGA movement

Many of Trump’s diehard followers are White Christians who have found a role model and outlet for their desires

Salon · Nov 22, 2023

Jon Nixon obituary

Other lives: Academic interested in intellectual history and prolific author of books including on Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg

The Guardian - UK · Nov 12, 2023