J. Danielle

To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

The challenge is that it has never been easier to make work that looks competent but says nothing.

To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of... See more

For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand— that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people.... See more

Ours is the work of helping others hold those artifacts and insights in their hands, however briefly, and of considering what ought to be reserved from the ever-sucking vortex of oblivion—and why. It’s the calling known as education, which the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once defined as the “non-coercive rearranging of desire.”