March 2013

From Eurozine: Barack Obama’s updated version of the so-called war on terror has received a free pass from most US political and legal scholars. To be sure, civil libertarians and liberal voices on the editorial pages of the New York Times have pilloried Obama for his failure to fulfil...

by Massimo Pigliucci The “Darwinian” theory of evolution is here to stay. I used the scare quotes to refer to it in the previous sentence because the current incarnation, known as the Modern Synthesis (and incorrectly referred to as “neo-Darwinism,” which actually was an even earlier version) is significantly...

With the death of Hugo Chávez last week, the battle for the interpretation of his legacy has begun. On the one hand, his followers will spare no effort in depicting him not only as a saviour of the nation, but also as a role model for the left in...

Amy Lowell, from the cover of TIME Magazine, March 2, 1925 by Amy Lowell Why should one read poetry? That seems to me a good deal like asking: Why should one eat? One eats because one has to, to support life, but every time one sits down to dinner...

James Joyce, Man Ray, 1922 by Juliet Flower MacCannell In his twenty-third seminar, Jacques Lacan framed the sinthome as a radical unknotting of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. He offered le sinthome not as a mere technical addition to the battery of psychoanalytic tools, but as a...

The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy were an odd mixture of the soft-headed and the hard-nosed. If they could be a dreamy, spook-ridden, eccentric bunch, they also had a keen eye for the price of an acre or the cost of a domestic servant. Washed up by history and finally dispossessed by...

Susan Polgar From Wired: Top coaches like Polgar don’t exactly teach their players chess strategy; the players already know what they’re doing. But a coach can help around the margins. Several hours a week, Polgar studies the chess equivalent of game film. Chess players tend to hone their skills...

On the Road, IFC Films, 2012 From The New York Review of Books: Kerouac was susceptible to film—a sucker for its promise of riches as well as its flickering poetry—and he imagined an iconic adaptation of On the Road. Not long after the book’s publication, in September 1957, he...

In the fall of 1849, Gustave Flaubert invited his two closest friends—Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp—to hear a reading of what he believed was to be his masterpiece: a retelling of the temptation of St. Anthony. The 30 year-old writer had been working on it for four years,...

by Justin E. H. Smith I’ve carried around with me for the past few years this idea that George Saunders discovered a new method for exploring the human soul at hitherto unimagined depths, that he was the culmination of what Nietzsche had in mind when he called Stendhal ‘a...

The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by...