November 2010
Theory of Everything but the Theorist
Arrow of Time, Vladimir Kush From Philosophy Now: Denying the reality of tensed time illustrates what happens when physics exceeds its proper bounds. Shrinking the conscious subject to an observer who is in turn reduced to a group of values assigned to mathematical variables, thus discarding memory and anticipation...
Read More‘Playing at cards is, after all, close to playing with fate’
What's the Big Deal? | by Sally Feldman
New Humanist
The Church has always been wary, regarding cards not merely as the route to gambling, but also as “the Devil’s picture-book” because of their association with dark practices like fortune-telling...
Read MoreThe Cosmos: Capitalism’s New “Outside”
Total Recall, 1990 From Monthly Review: In the early twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg argued that an “outside” to capitalism is important for two main reasons. First, it is needed as a means of creating massive numbers of new customers who would buy the goods made in the capitalist countries....
Read More‘An examination of cannibalism is bound to induce a species of metaphysical unease’
Illustration by Theodor de Bry from Americae Tertia Pars, 1592 From Cabinet Magazine: Have you sensed that readers have had trouble coming to terms with how there could be an intellectual history of cannibalism at all? I think cannibalism is challenging not just on an epistemological level. The cannibal provokes...
Read MoreTen Million Hopeful Scribblers
From More Intelligent Life: Somewhere in the world right now, ten million souls are hunched over their keyboards writing novels. Ten million hopeful scribblers in their holes. Good Lord, I’m one of them. The figure is an invention, but backed up by rough math. A quarter of a million...
Read MoreNamely Oprichniki
Tor-Björn Adelgren From The Day: You have stated previously that 20 years is a short term for history, yet some changes are taking place. I am personally worried not simply by reanimation, but by a powerful promotion of one of the most terrible people of the 20th century —...
Read MoreAlice Gregory: Refresh to See
From N+1: When we self-diagnose, we look for control factors. Sometimes we invent them. The goal of solipsistic anxiety is to find an individual agent that explains our misery. We eliminate possibilities one-by-one in hopes that a single cause remains. This is how people deduce food allergies and come...
Read MoreReflections on a Jewish Mirror
by Julian Bourg Jean-Paul Sartre and The Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Texts and Contexts) by Jonathan Judaken Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 408 pp. Given the sinuous tale of the distinctive relationship between France and Judaism and especially because the figure of the...
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The recipe for this French gâteau au chocolat came scrawled on a damp piece of paper, handed to me, along with a wink, a scowl and a bag of oysters, by Albertine, a sea-captain’s wife...
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Just across the street, there was the video game parlor. I call it that because it was not really an arcade, though some of the features were shared: a variety of consoles. It was called ABC studios...
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In African Freedom, Phyllis Taoua offers a study of “meaningful freedom” in Africa since independence from the perspective of literary studies...
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Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face.
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The recipe for this French gâteau au chocolat came scrawled on a damp piece of paper, handed to me, along with a wink, a scowl and a bag of oysters, by Albertine, a sea-captain’s wife...
Read More
Just across the street, there was the video game parlor. I call it that because it was not really an arcade, though some of the features were shared: a variety of consoles. It was called ABC studios...
Read More
In African Freedom, Phyllis Taoua offers a study of “meaningful freedom” in Africa since independence from the perspective of literary studies...
Read More
Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face.
Read More