The Ideas Letter

It is a supreme honor to feature Martin Jay, a legendary figure in European intellectual history. Marty (as he is known by the legions who revere him) blazed trails in his early work reconstructing the history of the Frankfurt School, which shaped how intellectuals came to read critical theory. It also inspired a decades-long comradeship with the recently passed Jürgen Habermas. There has been a blizzard of obituaries of the great philosopher of the public square, but Jay here offers something different: colorful personal reminiscences that spotlight Habermas’s great talent not only for critique but for listening.

The historian Sarah Miller-Davenport takes up Zohran Mamdani’s promise to rebuild a social democratic New York by reverting to a worker-centered New Deal liberalism. She argues that the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s impelled grim, austere neo-liberalism but that Mamdani’s affinity to Fiorello La Guardia, NYC’s New Deal mayoral hero, suggests a humane alternative to market rule. Just short of 100 days into Mamdani’s stewardship, the jury’s out: Is this the road back to worker power?

The distinctive voice of Afra Wang has been in our pages before; here, she takes up the idea of “jailbreaking,” as both an actual act and a metaphor for how technological peripheries innovate by challenging, copying, and reassembling what the center produces. Wang’s piece made me recall the thesis of the historian James Billington, whose magisterial The Icon and the Axe considered the history of Russian culture through the frame of borrowing, adaptation, and then radical innovation. Perhaps peripheries have always been destined to do exactly that, whether in technology or in culture?

Leading off our curated section, Alani Golanski has long paired his legal practice with a passion for philosophy and literature.