Amusing

Kieran Healy

I wonder when potential interviewees are going to start picking up on the fact that Chotiner's column is called "Interrogation" and that he's really very good at it.

The same response from Amia Srinivasan, an earnest, hip, young Oxbridge philosopher.

@IChotiner's interview with Ian Buruma on the NYRB's publication of Jian Ghomeshi's mea culpa is so deeply telling

Interrogation: Why Did the New York Review of Books Publish That Jian Ghomeshi Essay?
We Asked the Editor.

This on the same day The Economist had a polite sit-down with Steve Bannon. The New Yorker was forced to cancel; The Economist stood on principle, principles identical to the principles that govern academia.

repeats: Healy, and his wife

That's why I called it The Discovery of Experience.

On twitter I tried to connect people responding to Bannon to people talking about Buruma and Ghomeshi.  It didn't work. I added my usual points, except I used the word phenomenology.


Isaac Chotiner interrogated Ian Buruma as Marie Henein interrogated the victims of Jian Ghomeshi.
It's a messy business and it needs to be. As I said a few times, if Bannon were questioned as he needs to be he'd walk off the stage. And since people were paying money for the privilege of sitting in the audience that wasn't going to happen. But that's not the reason they used. They take themselves far too seriously to be so honest.

The university belongs, like the church and the military, to the social institutions that are situated at a considerable distance from democracy and adhere to premodern power structures.

Lawyers are craftspeople; craft is empiricism: watching, responding, pushing, digging, even into the minds of others against their will. Interrogation is not a dialogue. Dialogue is for elites; democracy is adversarial. "Lawyers, not judges, are the rule of law."

A new tag for Henein and her client.