The Ideas Letter

Bernard E. Harcourt and Dylan Riley are two of today’s foremost social theorists, Harcourt at Columbia and Riley at Berkeley. We are privileged, in our Issue 39, to feature their essays, which respectively endeavor to develop a new framework and a new conceptual vocabulary to apprehend our dismal moment.  

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is a rising star in the world of intellectual history. In our interview, I was eager to get purchase on how the ongoing renaissance in intellectual history has influenced public debate, and whether this has benefited the reading public outside of the academy.  

In our curated section, we lead with an interview with the incomparable Albie Sachs, the South African freedom fighter and former Constitutional Court judge. His biography establishes him as an archetype of moral courage. We then continue with another South African story, this one a dissection into the oft-forgotten radical wing of the long struggle (one wonders what Sachs would have said about the historical revisionism). Finally, we feature a riveting podcast on the esteemed British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, which covers considerable territory about many of your favorite analysts… and analysands! 

Our musical selection for Ideas Letter 39 is from the tenor genius Albert Ayler and his stentorian, rip-roaringly aggressive, and beautiful version of the Gershwin classic “Summertime.” It’s from 1963 and was recorded in Copenhagen, a city that like Paris many American jazz musicians gravitated to fleeing racism and seeking cultural acceptance. 

—Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations

The Trump II administration’s onslaught of executive orders and emergency declarations, and its effort to expand presidential power, is both extraordinary and in the lineage of U.S.