Legitimacy, cooption, retaliation: the three pillars of power are never more up for debate than in a year when a country elects its new leaders, when it exerts its democratic force to make the one who represents the majority best its chief executive. Mass media, educational institutions, and communities of worship all play important roles…
Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring, joins Interintellect founder Anna Gát to discuss the future of America and the interplay between government and entrepreneurship that he believes will define the next century. Is America on decline? Far from that! Drawing on historical examples and contemporary economic data, Packy McCormick argues that despite political and institutional…
Join sociologist and writer Musa al-Gharbi in conversation with novelist and theologian Tara Isabella Burton about his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. In We Have Never Been Woke, al-Gharbi argues that “wokeness” can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of an increasingly dominant class of elites: symbolic…
How are you here? You’re like an idea. A great idea. Sasha assumes, like most of us, that ideas are impoverished abstractions of material reality. Plato, however, held the opposite…
Are you striving to live someone else's definition of a good life? When you've got an atypical brain, you got to have atypical ambitions. Too often we unintentionally inherit an idea of a good life from our parents, cultural background, peers, and institutions. But it is always possible to reconnect with what would be most…
About Robin Hanson's book Elephant In the Brain (co-written by Kevin Simler): "Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains are therefore designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to get ahead socially, often by devious means. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The…
In 2023, Kiubon Kokko was awarded a $100,000 fellowship grant by O'Shaughnessy Ventures to create a feature documentary about his father's 10-12 hour swim from communist China to Hong Kong in 1973. In this salon, Kiubon will talk about what led to him undertake this project: the challenges he and his family faced in the…
Join us for an in-person Interintellect gathering where curiosity leads the way! As fall settles in and the seasons change, it’s the perfect time to come together in beautiful Old Town Alexandria. We’ll kick things off by exploring the themes of seasonality, friendships, and community, but as always, the conversation can go anywhere—from philosophy and…
Writer Henry Oliver continues the Western Canon Book Club series with a salon about the birth of Romanticism. Turgenev's greatest novel is one of the greatest Russian novels of the nineteenth century. A response to the new generation of nihilists, who saw the world very differently from their liberal fathers, this is a very resonant…
She thinks I’m a fascist? I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce. We just explained to them the immaculate, impeccable seamless garment of logic that is patriarchy. Barbie is taken aback when Sasha calls her a fascist for her role in perpetuating patriarchy. According to her director’s commentary, Gerwig actually had to…
Join Gina for a return of the Self-Compassion series this October! We will continue discussing Self-Compassion tips, insights, theories and more, diving more deeply into the relationships between Self-Compassion and Performance (physical, career and social!) For our first session, I encourage you to bring a piece of poetry or writing you adore or have written…
This year marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault, by some measures the most widely cited academic of the past hundred years. Often vilified on the right and celebrated—though arguably poorly understood—on the left, Foucault has cast a shadow over recent debates ranging from gender and sexuality and pandemic policy to policing…
