Toads in the Gorge
From Guernica: Kim Howell is a white-haired giant who wears Kissinger glasses that magnify his eyes. He was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and paid for a degree in vertebrate zoology at Cornell University by working at the school’s Library of Natural Sound. Howell preserved archival recordings of birdcalls collected...
Read MoreHow can it be that a tree blooms in winter?
Strip Show: In defense of bare trees | by Miriam N. Kotzin
The Smart Set
Driving alone on a highway through the desert of the Southwest, I passed a sign announcing the “Last Services for 100 Miles.” I asked myself, “How...
Read MoreHow could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so wrong about the environment?
Kenneth Brower has a number of theories: 1. Contrariness 2. He doesn’t really mean it 3. Educated fool 4. Old age 5. Collision of faiths From The Atlantic: In August 2009, Dyson appeared on the Charlie Rose show. His inimitable voice—somehow both diffident and firm, its original British...
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Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question...
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The pitfalls of identification, hero-worship, envy and malice can beset the most patient writer in the throes of five hundred-plus pages of attention to...
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Immanence is not philosophy, nor philosophy immanence. But there is in the passage from one to the other a modification of sense that is...
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Writing at sometime around 1930 or 1931, Walter Benjamin suggested that the voice on the radio is a like a visitor in the home,...
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At nineteen, it is easy to think that all you're missing is the right movement. But there is something about the young left wing...
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While local journalists were once again busy regurgitating worn-down, coma inducing positions about yet another spectral appearance of Enver Hoxha at the celebration of...
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The portrait of the 1% in your book is one of sociopathic, power-hungry narcissists with a striking lack of empathy. This may seem antagonistic,...
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Like many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
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Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The...
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I am in bed with a man. He has to go home. He is not staying the night. So he pulls out his iPhone...
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Some things are best met with silence. If I were to proceed with this month’s column in an honest way, it would be a...
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The man who brought us a disembodied protagonist alluringly voiced by Scarlett Johansson has now issued a drama — starring apparel. Recently, Opening Ceremony...
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At one point near the end of his unfinished novel Jean Santeuil, Marcel Proust describes a painting by Claude Monet from 1897, titled “Bras...
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There is perhaps nothing more enigmatic in the history of philosophy than that which in the tradition is known as the active intellect (nous...
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Berfrois Digs
Russian poetry calls for humaneness, respect and love. Instead of this, Mr Putin brings war and impoverishment to the already poor people of Russia.
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If philosophy questions everything, surely it must also question the periodization of its own history. Professional historians themselves tend to agree that the imposition of periods on the past –premodern, Renaissance, early modern, and so on-- is always to some degree arbitrary, even if it is also impossible to imagine how we could describe the past without any periodization at all.
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Both Derrida and Ronell suggest that saying yes is “telephonic,” both in the sense that it resounds over a distance and therefore always is affected by distortion and delay, and that the telephone as technological apparatus not so much adds to these inherent obstructions as it stands model for them.
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How is Mexhico? I’ve deprogrammed a Streets of Rage 2 cartridge to include a terrordactyl lots in it. I’ll post you a copy in the post, I mean, if that sounds like a good idea to you?
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Julia Margaret Cameron has long evoked interest not only because of her distinctive style but also because of her eccentric personality, her dominant role in a circle that in many ways prefigured the Bloomsbury of her grandniece, Virginia Woolf.
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The last gasps of the American revolutionary spirit were choked out in the Civil War, when the most conservative form of liberal government ever invented unhinged its jaws and swallowed its antithetical self, the South, whole — only to have to regurgitate some of its bones, of course, every twenty years or so since 1865.
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