December 2011
Always a Woman!

From the mid-twentieth century on Murdoch argued that modern philosophy, both in its analytic and French existentialist guises, is overly concerned with action and choice, operating with a naïve conception of the will and the idea of a liberal freely choosing agent.
Read More‘Modern’ Tibet

The Qinghai-Tibet Highway From Guardian: For some years now, Tibet has been part of the world’s fastest-growing and globalising economy – indeed Tibet, helped by government investments and subsidies, has enjoyed higher GDP growth than all of China. There has been a general rise in living standards. Many Tibetan...
Read MoreWhat do poetry editors do with all their time?

From Poetry: 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. This poet is named Kendall: Pat: Does it ever happen that someone gives you a poem for your magazine,...
Read MoreSplendid Cabin

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.”
Read MoreComprehensively: Berfrois Interviews Melissa Benn

by Russell Bennetts Melissa Benn is a British journalist and writer. She has written for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Marxism Today and many other publications. Her most recent book is School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education. Berfrois Is the comprehensive dream over? Benn Well yes...
Read MoreMight Marcuse remain a relevant source for social action and philosophical uplift?

From The Chronicle Review: Bless the American university, that exemplar of pluralism. Was it a playful University of Pennsylvania scheduler who managed to assign to the same all-purpose Houston Hall over a few days in October both the annual good-vibes Penn Family Weekend and “Critical Refusals: The International Herbert...
Read MoreQueer Gaming by Evan Lauteria

Last month, I spent an evening wandering through a mystical forest, desperately trying to move through the fog to find a clearing between the trees. I felt more and more anxious as I explored the wooded maze, haunted by the sounds the forest’s insect and avian inhabitants as I...
Read MoreHolly Watkins: Deep Music

An Overgrown Mineshaft, Carl Gustav Carus, c. 1824 by Holly Watkins When a friend says to you that she finds a piece of music deeply moving, you might assume she is referring to some intensely personal experience rooted in her unique psychological makeup. What’s more, you may sense that...
Read More‘Shiaphobia is nothing new for Saudi Arabia’

In 2004, anticipating the victory of the Shiite parties in the Iraqi parliamentary elections, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon that would be dominated by Iran with its large majority of Shias and Shiite clerical leadership.
Read MoreAnne Schutte: Gender and Monastic Release

by Anne Jacobson Schutte A desperate nun, thrust against her will into a convent by cruel parents, cannot obtain release. Such is the prevailing image of involuntary female monachization in early modern Europe. The engraving reproduced above comes from Denis Diderot’s novel La Religieuse ‒ begun in 1760, published...
Read MoreWaste Paper

‘Terse As Virulent Hermaphrodites’: Middlebrow Representations of Modernist Poets in the 1920s by George Simmers Based on a paper given at the conference on ‘The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism’, at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, 15 September, 2011. In P.G. Wodehouse’s 1925...
Read More“Is it a jail, father?”

Engraving of the U.S. Treasury building in 1804, from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, No. 262, March, 1872 by Alison K. Hoagland Fortress of Finance: The United States Treasury Building, by Pamela Scott, Washington DC: Treasury Historical Association, Illustrations. xiv + 318 pp Pamela Scott, the premier architectural historian of...
Read MoreEugenia Herbert: India’s Colonial Gardens

Researching an earlier book on the culture of late colonialism in the Upper Zambezi Valley of what was then Northern Rhodesia, I read a great many colonial memoirs, letters and reports, and interviewed ex-colonial officials. There were two things that surprised me: one was the importance of Worcestorshire sauce,...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
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