Berfrois

Goodbye, Hello

Goodbye, Hello

Thank you for reading Berfrois (2009-2022)!

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Ed Simon: Possess the Origin of all Poems

Ed Simon: Possess the Origin of all Poems

Underneath the volcanic ash and debris of Herculaneum, the elegant smaller sister of Pompeii, there is the earliest example of a chiseled wall writing that has come to be called the Sator Square...

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The Lost History of Prosecuting War Crimes by Amy Carney

The Lost History of Prosecuting War Crimes by Amy Carney

Human Rights after Hitler describes the rise and fall of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). But author Dan Plesch did not write this book...

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G.K. Chesterton: Dreams

G.K. Chesterton: Dreams

There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that "last night he dreamed a dream"...

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Julian of Norwich and the Process of Transformation

Julian of Norwich and the Process of Transformation

Julian of Norwich was born in 1342. No stranger to violence and suffering, she grew up in a world ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and torn apart...

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Thirty-Seven Pages by Shane Jesse Christmass

Thirty-Seven Pages by Shane Jesse Christmass

 A while ago, someone on Facebook was selling books. I purchased a few titles by Alfred Jarry and Edouard Leve. This was years ago.

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FOR SALE: Air

FOR SALE: Air

It is rare in the history of architecture for a new type of building to emerge. The Romans’ discovery of concrete birthed the great domes and fortifications of its empire.

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Liberalism and Slavery

Liberalism and Slavery

Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves is a teaser, an invitation to think through the historiography on Atlantic slavery as a liberal metanarrative...

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A Disanalogy of Disanalogies by Roland Bolz

A Disanalogy of Disanalogies by Roland Bolz

The following is ascribed to the 20th Century Polish mathematician Stefan Banach. "A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems...

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Gorgeous Gorey!

Gorgeous Gorey!

How does a deeply read, supremely pyrotechnic wordsmith, pioneer of cyberculture who popularized culture jamming and first articulated the notion of Afrofuturism...

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How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

Wombats captured the attention of English naturalists as soon as they found out about them from early settlers, explorers, and naturalists at the time of first contact...

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A National Education Service: Berfrois Interviews Melissa Benn

A National Education Service: Berfrois Interviews Melissa Benn

Our education system divided our nation, broadly along the lines of social class, choosing winners and losers at an early age...

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Socialist Sex Satisfaction

Socialist Sex Satisfaction

Women's sexual pleasure has rarely been treated as an appropriate subject for economics. Various political theorists have long ruminated on the dubiousness of even naming women’s sexual pleasure as though it were transhistoric...

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