Walter Isaacson
A former managing editor of Time magazine, Walter Isaacson is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. His books include Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster). He lives in Washington, D.C.
Articles by Walter Isaacson
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Einstein's Final Quest
In the later years of his life, after he had fled Nazi Germany at age fifty-four and moved to Princeton, New Jersey, Albert Einstein focused his scientific energies on what would turn out to be a futile quest: the search for a unified field theory. Such a theory would tie together the forces of gravity and electromagnetism with the subatomic forces described by quantum theory. He had befriended a fellow refugee physicist, Leopold Infeld, who occasionally tried to help in that effort. Most of Einstein’s colleagues were bemused by his stubbornness, but Infeld admired what he saw as yet another example of the determination that, over the decades, had made Einstein so great. “His tenacity in sticking to a problem for years, in returning to the problem again and again — this is the characteristic feature of Einstein’s genius,” he said.
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Kung Fu Fighting – a white boy from Kansas heads to the Orient
When I was thirteen, my friends and I all agreed about one thing: when we grew up we wanted to be Bruce Lee. I remember vividly the night we had this epiphany. Four of us were sitting in John Andersen’s elaborate basement — TV, VCR, sauna, Jacuzzi, pool table, olde tyme soda fountain — in his lavish home in Topeka, Kansas, eating three Pizza Hut pepperoni thin-crusts when his older brother brought down a videotape of Enter the Dragon.
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In the Name of Justice? – how punishment helps us think about utilitarianism, retributivism, and some other philosophies, too
On the morning of June 8, 2000, two men on a motorcycle shot Brigadier Stephen Saunders dead as he was driving to work at the British Embassy in Athens. The next day, his widow, Heather Saunders, arrived in the Greek capital and began what would turn out to be a three-year campaign to bring her husband’s killers to account. Her “tireless and relentless fight for justice,” as the BBC later described it, resulted in her being awarded an OBE – Officer of British Empire – early in 2003, and culminated later that year in the conviction of three members of a Marxist group, November 13, for her husband’s murder. Saunders said afterwards that “nobody really wins in this situation – but if they are taken off the streets for a while and given a piece of their own medicine, albeit in no comparison to what we have suffered, then that is perhaps justice.”
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Justice Shalt Thou Not Pursue – why the supreme court’s rejection of “justice” is a good thing
Why can’t you get appointed to the Supreme Court today if you’re a prospective justice who embraces Justice? In other words, why is it that none of the leading judicial philosophies on the current Court – from Antonin Scalia’s jurisprudence of original understanding to Stephen Breyer’s pragmatism to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s minimalism – puts justice at the center? In the 1960s, the Warren Court felt free to engage in the unabashed pursuit of justice, and some liberal and conservative theorists in the academy today still hold a torch for justice-based approaches grounded in natural law – that is, the idea that certain rights exist whether government recognizes them or not. But because of the political reaction to the excesses of Warrenism, it’s no longer politically feasible to be a justice who embraces Justice as a constitutional idea; instead, legal positivism – that is, the idea that rights should not be enforced unless they are democratically enacted into law – is the only thing that plays in the Senate and the country.
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Can Artists Ever Truly Be Modest?
Among the virtues commonly attributed to artists, modesty, it can confidently be said, is not to be found. In their professional capacity, painters and sculptors may be described as “visionary,” “innovative,” and the like. As human beings, however, they are almost always spoken of in pejorative terms. As Rudolf and Margot Wittkower observe in their 1963 book, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists, “There is an almost unanimous belief among [laymen] that artists are, and always have been, egocentric, temperamental, neurotic, rebellious, unreliable, licentious, extravagant, obsessed by their work, and altogether difficult to live with.”
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