December 2012

The familiar color bars. A sense of halted, paused time marking the edge-zone moments before or after the next show. The red, red shade of color bar #5 will be sampled and reaffirmed as a rose in shot #3.

From Building Stories, Chris Ware, 2012 From The New York Review of Books: In September 1999, as Jimmy Corrigan was nearing completion, Ware visited the preserved apartment of the outsider artist Henry Darger. Darger had lived an isolated existence, working feverishly on thousands upon thousands of pages of eccentric...

I remember when I was a pre-teen and they moved into a loft across the street from me in Tribeca, where I lived. And an older neighbor friend told me they were living in her building, on the top floor. I saw him at my corner deli, and on...

Robert Browning, Michele Gordigiani, 1858 by Gerald Massey Dramatis Personae, by Robert Browning, first published 1864, 258 pp. Many puzzled readers of current verse are, no doubt, marvelling what our modern poetry is coming to. When, where and how is all the apparent inconsistency to attain consistency? The Epic...

I am growing increasingly convinced that people who believe we have an absolute moral duty to see to the well-being of all other human beings, to install water-purifying equipment in villages on the other side of the world, etc., and who, at the same time, happily contribute to the...

Austin is the fastest-growing city in the United States. More than 150,000 people moved there in the last decade and the city now has almost 800,000 residents. The greater metro area added almost half a million people in the past ten years and now has a population of about...

by Markha Valenta Desperate to eject some refugees it does not want, the Netherlands is refining the art of radical deprivation. No single step, no single decision, no single action in this process is horrible. Yet the cumulative effect is grotesque. Some months ago, a group of refugees from...

One of the first things to happen after the Occupy Wall Street protestors were evicted from Zuccotti Park was the caging of Arthur Di Modica’s sculpture, the charging bull that has become synonymous with Wall Street. According to the New York Post: “Law-enforcement sources say the cops are keeping...

Cornel West From CounterPunch: Parmbir Gill: Cornel, you campaigned for Obama in 2008 but unlike many other critical supporters of the President, your critique of his policies eventually eclipsed your support as his first term unfolded. And as a result you’ve found yourself in confrontation with former comrades –...

Lady with Her Maidservant Holding a Letter, Jan Vermeer, 1667 From Eurozine: It appears that government in the twenty-first century has rekindled a long exhausted genre of power – epistolary government, which has been in decline at least since the epistolary novel began to lose its popularity. Thus, a...

Tuvia Tenenbom From Der Spiegel: “A book like mine, which outs the Germans as anti-Semites,” Tenenbom said with an indulgent smile, as he took a drag from his cigarette, “this sort of a book, as several people I know have assured me, should never have been published in Germany.”...

The maternal figures of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom are antithetical characters. Avril Incandenza, the imperious OCD-ridden mother figure in Infinite Jest, raises insecure children despite her profound love for them. On the contrary, Patty Berglund, the conflicted mother in Freedom, eventually adopts the role...

The public display of one's parenthood is increasingly a part of the expected career path of the professional philosopher...

Why not join our engaged audience by participating in our cross-platform social media strategy?

Hangover II, Charles Ginnever, 1983 by Massimo Pigliucci This semester I’ve been running a graduate level seminar at the City University of New York, on the difference between philosophy of science and science studies. The latter is a broad and somewhat vaguely defined term that includes (certain kinds of)...