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In his brilliant encyclopedia of “critical studies,” James Lindsay explains the core argument: “Like disability studies, fat studies draws on the work of Michel Foucault and queer theory to argue that negative attitudes to obesity are socially constructed and the result of systemic power that marginalizes and oppresses fat people (and fat perspectives) and of unjust medicalized narratives in order to justify prejudice against obese people.

Fatness — like race or gender — is not grounded in physical or biological reality. It is a function of systemic power. The task of fat studies is to “interrogate” this oppressive power and then dismantle it.

take the polar opposite position: Fatness is an unhealthy lifestyle that can be stopped by people just eating less and better. We haven’t always been this fat, and we should take responsibility for it, and the physical and psychological damage it brings. Some level of stigma is thereby inevitable, and arguably useful. Humans are not healthy when they are badly overweight; and the explosion in obesity in America has become a serious public-health issue.

I’m a Woody Allen person, not because I disbelieve Dylan—in fact, I believe her. I’m a Woody Allen person because his movies helped shape me, and I can’t unsee them, the way I can’t un-read The Great Gatsby or un-hear “Gimme Shelter.” These are things that informed my sensibilities. All of them are part of me.

As to our opinion about his past, one thing is for sure: He couldn’t care less about it. “Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public,” he says in the final lines of the book, “I prefer to live on in my apartment.”Exit laughing.

the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters in which the Woody Allen character, distraught by his realization that there is no God and considering suicide, stumbles into a revival house to find the movie playing. He says in voice-over: The movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. And I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. And I started to feel,  How can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn’t it so stupid? I mean, look at all the people up there on the screen. They’re real funny—and what if the worst is true? What if there’s no God and you only go around once and that’s it? Well, you know, don’t you want to be part of the experience? I did.I do.

It was only then that I truly appreciated how important the listener’s role is in the healing process. In “Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming,” Jonathan Shay calls this form of catharsis the communalization of grief, in which trauma survivors tell their stories and listeners can “listen, believe and remember.” This is when the circle of healing is complete.

what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left?

There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy. So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t.

people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech.

Cassirer was responding to the same crisis that animated the other three of Eilenberger’s magicians — a sense that the old ways of philosophizing had failed to keep up with the reality of lived experience.

Eilenberger quotes Max Scheler, another German philosopher, who put it this way: “Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”

Language was implicated in this plight, and the responses among the figures in this book were varied and often strange

... say we live on, say we’ll forget the masks that kept us from dying from the invisible, but say we won’t ever forget the invisible masks we realized we had been wearing most our lives, disguising ourselves from each other

Say we won’t veil ourselves again, that our souls will keep breathing timelessly, that we won’t return to clocking our lives with lists and appointments. Say we’ll keep our days errant as sun showers, impulsive as a star’s falling. Say this isn’t our end …

I say this might be the end we’ve always needed to begin again. I say this may be the end to let us hope to heal, to evolve, reach the stars.

It may seem strange that a man who co-founded two thriving civil-rights organizations, was an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a Pulitzer-finalist playwright, wrote a best-selling novel that has remained in print for more than 40 years, and had his play become a successful film 30 years after it was written would consider himself a failure, but Kramer has long been consistent on the point. “I am very cognizant of a great failing on my part,” he told the oral historian Eric Marcus in 1989: “that I did not have the ability to be a leader, that I did not have the ability to deal with my adversaries and still be friends.”

Having perceived himself as a failure, was Kramer proud of his accomplishments? “I feel well used, how’s that?” he said. “I’m proud of my organizations. GMHC is now thriving in a way it didn’t for a bunch of years.

“In the case of ACT UP, which I’m exceedingly proud of having founded, it was based on love and fear. You know, earlier on people said, ‘You’ll scare everybody to death. And I said, ‘Good. ‘Cause you should be afraid, because it’s frightening.’’”

It is extraordinary that a group of people who came to our country in chains came to understand the essence of Christianity and the essence of our country far better than their oppressors. You might even call it providential.