The End of the Beginning by Douglas Penick

This essay marks the ending of the lavish storehouse of riches known as Berfrois...
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith: Notes on Yer

In Old Church Slavonic there were two letters representing short vowels. These were called ‘yer’, and there were two species of them: the ‘front yer’, ‘ь’, and the ‘back yer’, ‘ъ’.
Read MoreEd Simon: First Twelve Observations about Goodness

One fourteenth century morning in the village of Montalilou, a simple woman named Bartholomette d’Urs, who slept every evening in her bed next to her young son, awoke to find that her boy had died of some unknown cause in the night.
Read MoreRead Barthes

The ad was meticulously crafted to foster outrage. I reposted it, commenting that it was “the most disgusting ad I’ve ever seen,” disregarding the inevitable: that my conservative friends might repost it.
Read MoreSomewhere Between Solitude and Loneliness

In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe described the ‘mad energy’ of an ageing man who roved the streets of London from dusk till dawn.
Read MoreThat 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.
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith: The Stockholm Conspiracy

While Monsieur Descartes was living peacefully at the Court of Sweden, whither his virtue, his dedication to the truth, his great genius in the sciences
Read MoreJeremy Woolsey on Buddhism and the Dead

When my grandpa died, we took his ashes to an IN-N-Out in Southern California and scattered them at the base of a palm tree when no one seemed to be watching.
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith: The Search for Intelligent Life

It is hard to read about SETI and more recent related projects looking for intelligent life in the stars without discerning in them certain silent presuppositions about what counts or should count as intelligent life on earth.
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith On Plants

Imagine you are in an urban park. Look around. How many animals do you see? I’d imagine you see a few birds, a dog or two, perhaps some insects, and a dozen or so humans.
Read MoreGerardo Muñoz on Andrés Ajens

To write or speak on behalf of Ajens’ recent book, Cúmulo Lúcumo (Das Kapital, 2017), is already to allude to its secret vortex. Cúmulo is a book that we welcome and celebrate yet another feat of language that dwells in a threshold.
Read MoreThe Hermeneutics of Babies

Babies are usually the stuff of private life, clichés, and endearing memories that we check out as we set foot on campus grounds. Yet babies are the greatest--and arguably the cutest--hermeneutic subjects.
Read Morej/j hastain: Priest/ess

My thought-forms don’t appear to me as grammar. For so long in my life I felt taxed by this—a kind of soul stressor. Would I have to translate these thought-forms pure from mystery into normative grammar for my entire life?
Read More‘Before Foucault, political philosophers had presumed that power had an essence’

Foucault remains one of the most cited 20th-century thinkers and is, according to some lists, the single most cited figure across the humanities and social sciences.
Read MoreGerardo Muñoz on Roberto Esposito

In a sequence of thirteen sections, Esposito dwells on the question of the origin of the political in light of western decline into nihilism, empire, and modern totalitarianism.
Read MoreVoltaire described Devadatta as a badly behaved rascal…

by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. This article was originally published at Public Domain Review, under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. After Ignatius Loyola formed the Society of Jesus in 1539, he required that his missionaries send back detailed letters describing their activities and the peoples and places they encountered. In France,...
Read MoreWe must be ready to mingle on the dance floor…

The antiliberal left has never been cooler. By ‘cool’ here I mean that its members have honed a mocking and casual disdain of the center-left’s alarmism, with a massive proliferation of memes and jokes.
Read MoreWhy do some rare individuals become the vehicles of universal ideas?

Born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, a city in the German Rhineland, Marx was the third child of Jewish converts to Christianity. His father Heinrich, né Herschel, had no choice except to fall in with the Lutheran Church if he wished to practice law in Prussia.
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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