October 2016

The earliest instance of a ghost in European literature, according to Bruce, is Elpenor. If you don’t remember Elpenor, you’re hardly alone. His own shipmates couldn’t remember him either.

In a review essay in the September 5th, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, professor Adam Kirsch poses a problem that is very similar in certain respects to the problem radical general semantics poses for us.

The fairy tale, that one single act of decision at the ballot box—supposedly someday in November—maybe the 8th or 28th has bearing or meaning, is coming to an end for many believers.

Just as San Francisco was named after an Italian saint and New Orleans after a French king’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, so New York, city and state, were named after King Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York.

There is no living American poet who deserves the characterization of being a prophet more than Bob Dylan. Both a product of his land and his land a product of him, Dylan the prophet has been Jeremiah by the rivers of Babylon

Today, global society is at the stage of searching for a model of social cohabitation. The problem lies in the fact that global societies have constructed their identities through culture and religion and therefore the process of cohabitation with others appears only as a process of assimilation.

The comics that Moore is best known for writing (“Watchmen,” “From Hell,” “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” etc.) generally make no secret of their sources of inspiration.

Deprived of its normative core and disappointed in its hopes for universal justice, contemporary liberalism is mute in the face of current conflicts and crises.

British writer and actor, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writes and stars in television series Fleabag. Waller-Bridge's character is unnamed throughout the episodes, though the viewer is meant to directly conjure the this soul-infested heroine.

A star sends its light through space, and this passes through the strong gravitational field of the sun. The field bends the light, so the position of the star changes.

I used to joke that between apparel, toys, books and DVDs, my family was, for a time, single-handedly funding Sesame Workshop, the non-profit that produces Sesame Street.

In the week leading up to Friday, September 2, 2016, I accompanied my father in his transition to death. I came back and he did not. I am not yet old, and was only there to help him across.

My husband and I went to the grocery store that evening and my doctor called right as I put my pickup in park. I answered my cell phone and with a kiss I waved my husband off to field the call by myself.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the term bureaucracy entered the world by way of French literature. The neologism was originally forged as a nonsense term to describe what its creator, political economist Vincent de Gournay, considered the ridiculous possibility of “rule by office,” or, more literally, “rule by a desk.”...

I have to admit, the tango was no evident musical choice for a film about a Belgian pub. One would rather expect to hear schlagers or chansons, exactly what we tried to do, but somehow they did not fit in, or perhaps they fitted just too well.

If Tim Lawrence had wanted his third book, “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” to go pop, he would have titled it “The World That Made Madonna,” picked a different cover, and added a chapter or two focusing on her.