In this salon, Danish-American literary critic and biographer Morten Høi Jensen leads a discussion of Thomas Mann’s journey from right-wing patriot to liberal democrat in an exploration of the fraught relationship between art and politics. Like many writers of his generation, Mann welcomed the outbreak of the First World War as a deliverance from the…
In this salon, literary critic and self-proclaimed atheist Morten Høi Jensen leads a discussion about the future of atheism. In his essay “Anxiety About God in an Ostensibly Godless Age,” the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski argued that the weakening of traditional religious belief brought down the certainty of atheism with it. “Ever since Nietzsche proclaimed…
George Packer, author of the National Book Award-winning The Unwinding, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century and, most recently, Last Best Hope, joins Morten Høi Jensen to discuss a life of writing, reporting, and thinking about America and its place in the world. “What…
