Archive

Sean Wilentz on Donald Trump and the Crisis in American Democracy

I don’t think we’ve had any­body quite like Donald Trump before, in terms of the pol­i­tics of celebri­ty, which is what I think he’s real­ly about. It’s not sim­ply that he’s rich. We’ve had rich peo­ple in pol­i­tics before. He’s not sim­ply a busi­ness­man. We’ve had busi­ness­men in pol­i­tics before.

Celebrity Chefs, Past and Present

There’ve always been celebri­ty chefs whose skill and cre­ativ­i­ty made them famous. But the pas­sage of time usu­al­ly means we know lit­tle more about them than their names. From ancient Greece and Rome there’s only one cook­book that sur­vives in full, that attrib­uted to the Roman cook Apicius, which dates actu­al­ly from the end of the Roman Empire.

Katherine Cross at The Conference 2015

Simply put, anonymi­ty does not cause harass­ment. It does play a role, but it’s much much more com­pli­cat­ed than most peo­ple have made it out to be. The rea­son that this is impor­tant to under­stand is because it’s hav­ing a prac­ti­cal impact on the world right now.