Berfrois

October 2018

Unsentimental Vistas

Unsentimental Vistas

When the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after nearly a decade away in Paris, she came back to a city transformed...

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Liberals today would benefit from injecting a dose of Marxian materialism into their thinking…

Liberals today would benefit from injecting a dose of Marxian materialism into their thinking…

The error that Appiah denounces is “essentialism”: the theory that members of the same group share some inner essence that explains what they have in common.

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Feel Less Passive

Feel Less Passive

I am standing beside a small male cop. It’s four days before the Kavanaugh vote, and we still have a kind of hope or momentum ...

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More Strategic Than Sentimental

More Strategic Than Sentimental

One month into their marriage, my parents leave Turkey for good. It’s my mom’s first time on a plane. They fly from Ankara to Brisbane, an Australian city where they don’t know anyone.

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Are You and Your Microbes a Community or a Single Entity?

Are You and Your Microbes a Community or a Single Entity?

Cicadas might be a pest, but they’re special in a few respects. For one, these droning insects have a habit of emerging after a prime number of years...

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Gregory Giles and Teresa K. Miller Discuss Tortured Genius

Gregory Giles and Teresa K. Miller Discuss Tortured Genius

People often said that he finished sentences for me. Well, he did. He was between me and the world. He not only answered the telephone; he finished my sentences.

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Airline Travel and the African Diaspora

Airline Travel and the African Diaspora

In the prologue to Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora, Chandra D. Bhimull begins with two narratives about death.

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Eli S. Evans on the Kavanaugh Affair

Eli S. Evans on the Kavanaugh Affair

by Eli S. Evans During the weekdays in the summer of 1982 … I spent much of my time working, working out, lifting weights, playing basketball, or hanging out and having some beers with friends as we talked about life, and football, and school and girls. —Brett Kavanaugh, Senate...

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Uncertain Types

Uncertain Types

Merve Emre strikesa rare off-note in her crackling new book, The Personality Brokers, when she briefly purports not to understand the appeal of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

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The Buddhist Monk Who Became an Apostle for Sexual Freedom

The Buddhist Monk Who Became an Apostle for Sexual Freedom

Buddhist monks follow a lot of rules – 253 in one tradition, 200 in another. As the story goes, all of these rules were made by the Buddha himself...

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