What we've been up to

From the new issue: It's tempting to think of Simone Weil as a kind of holy fool. She had mystical encounters and wrote with prophetic aspirations and, at times, an oracular style. She could also be ridiculous, going to Spain to fight fascists, to take just one example, but tripping into a pot of hot cooking oil and singeing her leg before she saw any combat. In "Principled to a Fault," Becca Rothfeld, a writer and doctoral candidate in philosophy at Harvard, argues these are a few reasons why Weil, despite the well-meaning intentions of her latest biographer, Robert Zaretsky, does not fit into the neat boxes of modern analytic philosophy. As Rothfeld puts it, Weil remains a remarkably poor candidate for domestication.

"The point is the violent originality of the idea, and the striking personality that produced it, and the bright chime of the language. Zaretsky is concerned with evaluating Weil's arguments as successful or unsuccessful, as if the propositions she defends are like hands that can be extracted from the gloves of their expression," Rothfeld writes. "No doubt there is something to be gained from treating Weil's writings like the standard analytic fare—but there is no denying that in this instance the glove is much of what lends the hand its interest and its elegance.

Also from the latest issue: It's not just that the meritocratic class believes that they achieved status, wealth, and power by their own abstemious ambition and natural abilities. They also tend to view their lifestyles and preferences in moralizing terms. In "The Endless Pursuit of Better," Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, who named them in her latest book "the aspirational class," analyzes their almost pathological obliviousness. This obliviousness, of course, is not only tedious and sententious, but it's also tearing our country apart.

"What is clear is that the great divisions in our country rest on our different systems of cultural capital, including the language with which we communicate those systems," writes Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. "That our aspirational class embeds morality in its choices—culturally specific choices dependent on certain entrenched privileges and the habitus that comes with and reinforces such privileges—means that most Americans who opt out of the aspirationals' game may actively seek alternatives to being patronized."

Want to read more from the new issue?

Philip S. Gorski on the transformation of culture wars into culture clashes.

Jackson Arn reviews The Free World by Louis Menand.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: In "Why We Confess," Elizabeth Bruenig considers the confessional and confessional literature. Divulging our private foibles and mundane transgressions, she suggests, takes something ordinary—sometimes tediously so—and raises it to the level of vital human significance. "Contemporary confession rarely comes in the theological style of Augustine or the straightforwardly earnest form of De Quincey," writes Bruenig, staff writer at The Atlantic. "As confessors (not in the ecclesial sense), we desire to share, but never so much as to seem narcissistic or melodramatic; we want to reveal but not to be wholly revealed; we need to be understood on our own terms without limiting them deceptively. We perform our many miniature confessions, which are at once more complicated than they seem yet just as mundane."

From further afield:

At The Point, Brad East writes about the problem George Scialabba has with Wendell Berry.

At The Nation, Becca Rothfeld reads the latest novel by Diane Johnson and discovers bleak, shrunken lives.

And, at Harper's Magazine, Thomas Frank takes on Jon Meacham, that friend of presidents, and his latest, stilted history of the United States.