March 2014

Amazon warehouse in Madrid, Spain. Photograph by Álvaro Ibáñez From N+1: In The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, author Brad Stone claims that although Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ultimately supported the book, “he judged that it was ‘too early’ for a reflective look at Amazon.”...

Philosophy Consoling Boethius and Fortune Turning the Wheel, attributed to Henri de Vulcop, c.1470 From Notre Dame Philosophical Review: What are we to make of the recent ascendance of Alain Badiou to the position of general representative of French philosophy in the Anglophone humanities? There are multiple possible explanations,...

I, myself, was barely six months old when Twin/Tone put out The Mats’ Let It Be. The day, they say, was Orwellian: Tuesday, October 2, 1984.

Naturally, I recall nothing of it.

Growing up, simple arithmetic holds I was 20 when Colin Meloy’s book about Let It Be was released by...

When Yaweh advanced into Ezekiel in the form of penetration, the four wings of the chariot became instantly erect and bloodshot and then fell directly into limpness.

Marcel Duchamp sat silent. He seemed far away, lost in reverie. Then, he spoke of the death of art, which he described as “posterity, meaning art history.”

We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna grass; the rest of the party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond the pale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellated bridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song of invisible larks,...

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya in 2009. Photograph by David Shankbone From The Nation: We are likely to hear a lot more of this woman. Some October, perhaps, from the Nobel Prize committee. She certainly has the stature. Translated into many languages, the winner of multiple major awards, not only is she...

Varanasi, India. Photograph by Raghu Rai by Leila Seth My name is Leila Seth. I am eighty-three years old. I have been in a long and happy marriage of more than sixty years with my husband Premo, and am the mother of three children. The eldest, Vikram, is a...

by Immanuel Kant Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper’s sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is...

For my last post on Cervantes and his “invention of fiction” before handing in my finished manuscript, I wanted to return to one of the most influential interpretations of his work in the twentieth century: that of Michel Foucault. To begin with, we should recall that Foucault chooses two...

Dan Gluibizzi, Untitled (watercolor, 30 x 22, 2010) by Daniel Bosch Twenty-three brunettes, 10 puffs of pubic hair, nine pairs of panties, two t-shirts, two socks, one tank-top, one bra, one bottle, and one bowling ball—though I suppose it could be a basketball, a medicine ball, or a soccer...

Via From London Review of Books: Asked for his response to those critics who saw in The Wolf of Wall Street an undiluted celebration of the bad life – drugs, sex, money, jewels, a very large yacht and expensive suits – Leonardo DiCaprio said: ‘If they don’t get the...

by Justin E. H. Smith I dreamt last night that I was sharing a taxi with Putin from Moscow to Sheremetyevo airport. He was being very friendly and I could tell he liked me. I felt like a coward and a moral cretin for not saying anything critical that...

The first game was on his boat, or not so much a boat as a rusty, cozy dinghy harbored on the Sausalito Bay. This was the Fourth of July. I had met G-- a week before, at a dive piano bar called the Alley where I sang open mic...

Frescoes in the church of Abuna Yemata Guh, Gheralta, Ethiopia. Photograph by Owen Barder From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: Kebede proposes examining how the concept of time shapes Ethiopian identity and Ethiopia’s relationship to modernity. He distinguishes between a cyclical conception of time and a teleological conception of time....

There is an oft-ignored detail about Nietzsche’s story of the madman in the marketplace: the good townspeople who aren’t ready to receive the news of God’s death aren’t Christians — they’re atheists. Today’s marketplace is no longer the town square; it’s the hyper-connected virtual world of global commerce.

Androla in Labyrinth, Shusei Nagaoka, 1984. Image via by Carolyn Guertin For many the term postfeminist might call to mind the vanilla pleasures of metrosexuality, webcams, online soaps, and blog culture, but, for me, a 40-something cyberfeminist scholar, curator and some time activist, the politically-minded feminist texts I work...

I learned that Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff had been a Nazi when I was in a Santa Marta supermarket. I had just stepped into the Exito Hypermarket when someone shout “Jerry! Jerry!” and I turned to see the archaeologist, Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo.