Berfrois

2017

  • Ed Simon: Poetry Without Poets

    2017 Highlights

    Ed Simon: Poetry Without Poets

    Despite its aesthetic proficiencies or deficiencies, A.I.-Wordsworth’s poem is not necessarily without meaning, even if it’s a message without a messenger.

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  • Eric D. Lehman: Sharing Stories at Kinlochard

    2017 Highlights

    Eric D. Lehman: Sharing Stories at Kinlochard

    We took a wrong turn in Aberfoyle. Instead of heading toward Loch Katrine, the home of Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, my wife Amy and I headed along a sketchy broken road to Loch Ard.

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Primo Levi on Translating and Being Translated

Primo Levi on Translating and Being Translated

Genesis tells us that the first men had only one language: this made them so ambitious and powerful they began building a tower high into the sky.

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Before and After Fossil Fuels

Before and After Fossil Fuels

Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.

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Most checkers games end in a draw…

Most checkers games end in a draw…

At the highest levels, checkers is a game of mental attrition. Most games are draws. In serious matches, players don’t begin with the standard initial starting position.

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Life slips away in the reworking of one’s writings…

Life slips away in the reworking of one’s writings…

by Michael Wood But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. —T. W. Adorno Current conversations about the essay—and there are many—emphasize the provisional, speculative nature of the genre, the suggestion of a...

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A compelling impression of untethered bodies floating across vast distances…

A compelling impression of untethered bodies floating across vast distances…

The same year that the US nominated its first female presidential candidate, the Met presented, an opera composed by a woman...

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That Time the Way That It Is and Was

That Time the Way That It Is and Was

So far this makes it sound as if philosophers are a bunch of science fiction spoil sports. Not so! Although philosophers typically agree that we cannot change the past, most think it possible to causally affect the past.

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Keith Doubt at Bosnia’s March of Peace

Keith Doubt at Bosnia’s March of Peace

Marš Mira is a commemorative march, like others elsewhere throughout the world, that retraces the long, treacherous route that survivors of the Srebrenica genocide followed to escape the Serbian army.

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Sex became inextricable from Diane Arbus’s photography…

Sex became inextricable from Diane Arbus’s photography…

Arbus was clear about what she wanted and why. The trouble is there’s still such scant understanding, let alone appreciation, for what it means to be a woman and wired the way she was.

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Morning on the Wissahiccon

Morning on the Wissahiccon

The natural scenery of America has often been contrasted, in its general features as well as in detail, with the landscape of the Old World

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Colin Raff: Variations on a Brandenburg Salamander

Colin Raff: Variations on a Brandenburg Salamander

In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule

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FREE UNIVERSITY TUITION

FREE UNIVERSITY TUITION

What was heartening about the general election was that it suggested a new symbolic status for policy of the sort that technocratic politics was unable to manufacture.

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