October 2010

The first thing to be said is that to define Modernism in any way at all is to take a stand. In that it is like Romanticism. You cannot write a 'history of Romanticism' or of Modernism, because you cannot stand above it on some neutral vantage-point.

Bill Bailey Comes Home | by John Jeremiah Sullivan

The Paris Review Blog

 I followed the band around Europe for a while, feeding cigarettes to the band members’ model girlfriends and failing to secure face time with “Ax”...

  From American Scientist: Let me reintroduce you to planet Earth. Nearly 64 percent of its surface, close to 208,640,000 square kilometers, sits below 200 meters of water. The lack of light at those depths prohibits photosynthesis, the biological energy conversion system that is the foundation of most food...

From The Millions: I’ve been on the Internet since I was fourteen years old. I’ve always loved it here. But a few months back, I found myself a bit troubled by what I perceived to be a difference in the way my mind was working. I would be at...

Noises On | by Patrick Dillon

OperaNews

"Am I too loud?" Gerald Moore famously queried in the title of his "musical autobiography" of 1962...

by A. Roger Ekirch From Common-Place: In London on St. Valentine’s Day in 1945, the aspiring young novelist Patrick O’Brian, today regarded as one of the great twentieth-century writers of historical fiction, received as a gift an early volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Published in 1744, it briefly recounted...

From Foreign Policy: Theories, factual claims, and policy proposals that seemed dead and buried in the wake of the  financial crisis are now clawing their way through the soft earth, ready to wreak havoc once again. Five of these zombie ideas seem worthy of particular attention and, if possible,...