Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft is a writer and historian, currently completing a book about laboratory-grown meat and the history of the future of food. His books include Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt and Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
The Involuted Palate, or the Savage Crinkle of Future Snacks
In a delightful essay, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft suggests “involution” characterizes the food-tech nexus every bit as much as innovation....
Dishing: On John Birdsall’s “The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard”
An engaging new biography of the pioneer of American cuisine....
Why Look at Flying Saucers?
On the trail of bigfoot hunters and UFO enthusiasts....
A Culture of Promises: On Liz Marshall’s “Meat the Future”
The new documentary “Meat the Future” presents the case for cultured meat in terms that are almost naïve....
On Reading Jonathan Gold
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft remembers Jonathan Gold, who helped him fall in love with Los Angeles....
Recline of the West: Couches and Psychoanalysis
How did psychoanalysis get its couch?...
Thinking, Public and Private: Intellectuals in the Time of the Public
An essay by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft on the “public intellectual,” with particular attention to Mark Greif, Corey Robin, Russell Jacoby, and Hannah Arendt....
The State That I Am In: Hannah Arendt in America
How did the United States change Hannah Arendt? Richard King's ambitious new book is a welcome addition to a crowded scholarly field of works on Arendt....
Space Jew, or, Walter Benjamin Among the Stars
If Walter Benjamin had been quicker to flee the Nazis, he might have stood in India during the twilight years of the Raj and experienced the stars anew....
Writing in Cafés: A Personal History
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft on writing in cafés....
Three Contemporary Spinozas
A Spinozist politics? Mathematics? Posthumanism? Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza is, as Hasana Sharp points out, a "philosopher of many posthumous births."...
Notes on “Note-by-Note”: A New Molecular Cuisine?
You are what you think you are eating....
Friends of Leo
Robert Howse’s bold and admirable new study seeks to rehabilitate Strauss, who has been repeatedly (and posthumously) identified as the origin point of a neoconservative conspiracy....
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