The Journal of American Culture, 1982

In C. Giannantonio, and A. Hurley-Hanson (Eds), Extreme leadership: Leaders, teams, and situations outside the norm. Northampton, MA: Edward Edgar Publishing. , 2013

Extrapolation, 1991

The voices of glorification of America's destiny have never been silent in North American science fiction, especially after the victorious end of World War II. For a large number of writers, this victory signified the beginning of a new era of optimism. Donald Wollheim's title for his study of modern science fiction, The Universe Makers, is illustrative of this mood. His view of the future awaiting humankind was certainly not unique: Atomic power-how many times had stories shown what a world of wonders and prosperity would be humanity's if we could tag the infinite power of the atom .... We could rebuild the world and with such power end poverty, make the world Utopia, and finally climb to the stars .... Transmutation of the elements would be open to us.

Griffith Review 26: Stories for Today, 2009

The MacArthur Fellows Program would be more effective in supporting creatives if it simply stopped giving fellowships to people with secure jobs at elite institutions; they don’t need help in order to function. This paper elaborates that argument; considers three fellows gifted in the first year; examines the problems involved in evaluating talent; and evaluates three elite schools. It concludes by looking at the careers of three certified geniuses: Louis Armstrong, John von Neumann, and Richard Feynman. Version 7 has updates on the classes of 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018.

In considering future visions and public relations, we position such speculations as imaginative art rather than exact science and move away from dominant approaches in two key literatures. Firstly, in relation to leadership literature, while acknowledging the contribution it has made to the importance of future vision, we distance ourselves from the view that such projections are the restricted domain of leadership. Instead we show how they matter to public relations by extending Rost’s (1993) conceptualisation of a divide between twentieth and twenty-first century paradigms to support the usefulness of scenarios in preparing for change in uncertain times. Secondly, in relation to public relations education, we move away from the more quantitative and business-as-usual US forecasts for the 21st Century. In making these departures we draw from other futurist writings, especially scenario theory and practice, to contend that public relations, both as a practice and as a body of theory, needs to be more knowledgeable about, and more involved in, existing projections. We conclude by recommending that scenarios become an accepted part of preparing public relations for the nonlinear, business-as-unusual future predictions not addressed in the field’s current thinking.

SOCIETY, 2013

In 2003, a serendipitous encounter set me on an unexpectedly long intellectual journey, lasting almost two decades, that resulted in Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes, which appeared in English in May, 2022 and in German in December, 2022. Despite the fact that it is a big book (some 600 pages in the English edition and 900 pages in the German) about a somewhat obscure intellectual, it was very widely reviewed-with varying and sometimes surprising verdicts-in the United States and even more so in German-speaking Europe. Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) was an unfamiliar name to most English-speakers, and was only slightly better known in Germany. In terms of his substantive, lasting contributions, he was not among the most important intellectuals of his time. But his life, I thought, was among the most interesting. Scion of a distinguished line of Talmudic scholars and himself an ordained rabbi, he was an impresario of ideas. He was not only a scholar of apocalyptic and antinomian movements (hence the book's title) but an antinomian in the practice of his own life, whose inner restlessness led him from interwar Vienna to Zurich, Jerusalem, and several major American universities, and then to the faculty of the Free University in Cold War era Berlin, where he served as mentor to the student Left while befriending intellectuals of the radical right. Regarded by some as a genius, by others as a charlatan, Taubes moved among yeshivas, monasteries, and leading academic institutions on three continents. He wandered between Judaism and Christianity, between left and right, piety and transgression. Along the way, he interacted with many of the leading minds of the twentieth century, from Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem to Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, and Carl Schmitt. Twice married, twice divorced, and the protagonist of countless affairs; were his life to be filmed, it would have to be a mini-series, at least.

2012

sociology.org