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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

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When consolation fails: Christmas and the ethics of non-reconciliation

Every December we are invited—ritually, insistently—to feel better. Christmas culture promises reconciliation: with our families, our failures,...

26.12.2025 10

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Recognition, freedom, and the assault on transgender existence

Recent efforts to withdraw federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to transgender adolescents represent more than a...

21.12.2025 8

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Trump and the collapse of the American idea

Trump and the collapse of the American idea

The rise of authoritarian populism is not merely a constitutional emergency or a moral aberration: it is the empirical symptom of a metaphysical...

17.12.2025 9

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Schelling’s philosophy of nature and the renewal of the earth

The environmental crises confronting the world today—climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, and the poisoning of air and water—reveal not...

07.12.2025 20

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Witnessing the universal: John Wilson’s art of emancipation

In Witnessing Humanity, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Wilson transforms the act of bearing witness into an emancipatory...

27.11.2025 20

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Alain Badiou, truth, and the moral permissibility of abortion

Alain Badiou never wrote a treatise on abortion, yet his philosophy provides an illuminating framework for thinking about it. His ideas — truth as...

21.11.2025 10

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

The universal betrayed: How liberalism lost the world

Why has liberal democracy proved so helpless before the new authoritarianism? Why has liberalism failed to stem the tide of reaction now sweeping the...

14.11.2025 10

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

J. M. W. Turner’s The Lake of Zug at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum’s Allegory and Abstraction offers a compelling rotation from the Department of Drawings and Prints, bringing forward how...

06.11.2025 6

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Fichte and the Right to Be Well: A Philosophical Case for Universal Healthcare

If there is one thing modern societies have learned from pandemic years and chronic inequality, it is that health is not a private matter. The spread...

28.10.2025 8

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Metropolitan Opera’s Don Giovanni mirrors a world on the verge of moral collapse

The Metropolitan Opera has revived Ivo van Hove’s austere 2023 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Van Hove’s unforgiving approach strips away...

18.10.2025 70

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Caspar David Friedrich at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Caspar David Friedrich is among those great painters the appreciation of whom has ironically suffered through the overexposure of a handful of...

29.03.2025 9

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Trump’s despotic reign is the antithesis of genuine republicanism

It should be clear to all Americans with eyes to see that we are witnessing the rise of a despotic presidency whose administration will test this...

02.03.2025 20

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Édouard Manet at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum

The subject of the paintings included in Manet: A Model Family, on view at Boston’s Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, would ostensibly be the members...

16.01.2025 9

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

A painterly dialogue: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts at the Currier Museum

In certain respects, the Currier Museum’s Jean Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts: A Distant Conversation may be regarded as a modest exhibition,...

20.12.2024 3

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Treasure the Dark: Mario de Maria at Bologna’s Museo Ottocento

The Museo Ottocento Bologna is currently presenting Mario De Maria, “Marius Pictor” (1852-1924). Ombra cara, an exhibition devoted to the work of...

14.08.2024 1

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Some reflections on Miloš Forman’s Amadeus, forty years later

The IFC Center in New York’s Greenwich Village is currently showing a newly restored version of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984) in commemoration of...

08.08.2024 1

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Dr. Sam Ben-Meir