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One suspects that just as Lowell drew out of Bishop—in her effort to engage and entertain him—a previously unforeseen willingness to indulge in literary shoptalk and to reflect on the theatre of ideas, Bishop drew out of Lowell—in his effort to engage and entertain her—a capacity for lively and precise observation and anecdote for which he possessed a latent talent that had not yet been so directly expressed in his poetry or letters.
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The economic rise of China now dominates the entire landscape of international affairs. In the eyes of political analysts and statesmen, China is seen as potentially “the world’s largest economic power by 2019.”
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Empirical study led L. Ron Hubbard to the principles on which Scientology is based. He never claimed to have had a revelation. He spelled the principles out in 1950 in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the bestselling self-help treatise in which he presents rationality as our birthright.
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If Borges continually returned to his first book of poetry, endlessly tinkering with it and republishing it in slightly different form so that it would truly prefigure "everything that he would do afterwards" (Obras completas 33), his approach to his first book of prose was quite different.
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Is there much value in describing again the demonstrations, encampments and activist movements already covered, seemingly exhaustively, by the traditional and new media over the last two years?
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My life, in those days, was to be defined by three female poets: Dana Levin, Olena Kalytiak Davis, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Where lies the fault in that? Could I be blamed for seeing darkness in everything? Or for feeling, at some point of no return, that it was not I who had chosen them, but rather they who had chosen me?
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Visitors and residents alike tend to think of New Zealand as a clean, green land, rivaling Ireland in the luxuriance of its verdure and leading the world in the naturalness of its nature. In Seeds of Empire, Tom Brooking, Eric Pawson, and their collaborators point out that the rolling meadows that cover much of New Zealand were built on a particular colonial ideology of food production and inputs of large amounts of fertilizer.
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In the summer of 1918, T.S. Eliot was alarmed by the news that the American armed forces in Europe, then engaged in the final campaign against Germany, would begin to conscript American citizens living in England.
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Victorian poetry is famous for documenting the emergence of key strains of secular modern thought, including those associated with natural science and modern biblical criticism. Breathtaking advances in astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology during this era had produced a very different looking cosmos from that imagined in the book of Genesis.
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One evening, perhaps a decade ago, I was walking along Canal Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown when a fishmonger, rushing out of his shop carrying a tank full of eels, slipped.
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Whenever a new anthology of modern U.S. poetry comes along, it seems that some distinguished critic or other is fated to take up arms, defending his or her vision of canonical distinction against the treachery of "inclusiveness."
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Given the subject matter of this work, it seems only appropriate to begin with a musical metaphor. Sonic Persuasions is like one of those rock ‘n’ roll albums from the early 1960s, released before the Beatles popularized the notion that songs should be thematically related.
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Across the piazza, there’s a little museum for the found leavings of refugees. Here are the things that wash up: plates, water bottles, prayer books in every imaginable language.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the new father, was twenty-three years old. It was five years after he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, as a classical scholar of dazzling promise; three years after he drank, whored, neglected his studies, ran up debts, considered shooting himself, accepted a bounty of six and a half guineas to join the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons.
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On the face of it, a conception does not seem the sort of thing it is easy to lose. If we think of our life with concepts in terms of our ways of going on, categorizing and thinking about the phenomena in the world, including ourselves, then it makes sense that certain concepts might lose their viability for us, and thus fall out of use.
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In a conversation I’m picturing, an imaginary American novelist named Pat is having drinks with a poet who is also the editor of some sort of poetry journal.
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Abraham Lincoln famously greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe at the White House in 1862, “so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
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by Albena Azmanova
It was in a moment of exasperation, one imagines, that Kant discovered what he named ‘the scandal of reason’ – reason’s tendency to get entangled in its own contradictions and thus degenerate into either dogma or uncertainty – a tendency that has haunted modern history.
by Robyn Ferrell
Paintings are the moon and stars in a dark sky for Australian Aboriginal communities. The economic success of this art holds out an almost utopic prospect of a cultural renaissance. Yet poverty, violence and third-world living standards in its remote communities remain the present reality.
by Barry Mazur
I came late to the feeling that the purity of mathematical ideas had any need for story or for the temporal intrusion of personal accounts. But, I’ve changed, quite a bit.
by Cain Todd
Locating the murky distinction between pornography and erotic art has long exercised minds in many domains, philosophy amongst them. One of the chief ways in which philosophers have sought to draw the distinction is by illuminating the nature of the different types of appreciation specific and appropriate to each. 
by Maryann Corbett
A reviewer once described the writer Thomas Lynch as a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats. I’ll say more later about the Yeats genes in this hybrid cross. But the comparison with Keillor is apt: both men are big, bearded, jowly and affable in performance. 
by Jeremy Fernando
From the beginning, we knew he would not die. For, we’ve always known that Kim Jong Il is a media event. Unless you were in his inner circle, no one even knew him other than through the media. Not just in death, but right from the very start. He might well have never even been born—or been born twice; it would be exactly the same.
by Bill Benzon
It is a truth universally acknowledged that What’s Opera, Doc? is one of the finest cartoons ever made. It satirizes opera, Wagner in particular; it parodies Disney’s Fantasia, and, for that matter, it parodies the routines of its stars, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. 
by Inderjeet Parmer
“SWITZERLAND EXPOSED,” screamed the title of a book I happened to see recently, drawing a wry smile, and a feeling of “you can’t be serious!” That’s the usual response when people hear about my new research on American philanthropic foundations, which argues that they are not so “cuddly” a bunch as their image suggests.
by John Gaffney
It is the received view – a view that took root that fateful evening at Fouquet’s restaurant, the evening of his victory over his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in May 2007 – that Nicolas Sarkozy as President between 2007 and 2012 betrayed Charles de Gaulle’s République de Grandeur, replacing it with a République de ‘bling’.
by Patrick Downey
Whereas Capone was famous for being the CEO of the largest criminal enterprise in the U.S., Jack was famous for getting shot, beating the rap and carrying on a highly publicized extra-marital affair with his Ziegfeld showgirl mistress.
by Jason Dittmer
There is a great symmetry between the formal properties of comics and contemporary network ontologies prominent in the social sciences, but this symmetry needs to be explored in the literature in order to inform future research agendas in the social sciences and humanities. 
by Shuwei Fang
China shines by keeping its industrial production and service industries in perfect tandem with the technological frontier. Like the Red Queen, it runs as fast as possible in order to remain at the cusp of the global technology frontier, while not actually advancing the frontier itself.
by Meaghan Emery
Every once in a while a film comes out that breaks through conventional wisdom. The idea that a black and white silent film in 2011 could be such a resounding critical and commercial success, in addition to its prominence in international film festivals, six Césars, and now five Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best actor, best original score, and best costume design, who would have thought?
by Susan Glaspell
When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away—it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County.Most Popular
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