When I look back over the years I see myself, a little child of scarcely four years of age, walking in front of my nurse, in a green English lane, and listening to her tell another of her kind that my mother is Chinese.
Read MorePoster by Cea. by Artemy Troitsky, Peter Pomerantsev and Oliver Carroll Russia’s 1968? Oliver Carroll: From Voina to Bykov, Pussy Riot to Moscow hipsterism, culture seems to be playing a very political game in Russia. How can we explain this? Is this something that Russia has seen before? Are we witnessing this Russia’s ‘1968’ moment?…
Read Moreby Massimo Pigliucci The “Darwinian” theory of evolution is here to stay. I used the scare quotes to refer to it in the previous sentence because the current incarnation, known as the Modern Synthesis (and incorrectly referred to as “neo-Darwinism,” which actually was an even earlier version) is significantly more sophisticated and encompassing than the…
Read MoreAh! bougre de salaud tu m’as appelé vache, Félix Vallotton, 1902 9. Measured always by the standard of antiquity (this antiquity, moreover, is present or again possible at all periods), the community stands to its members in that important and radical relationship of creditor to his owers.” Man lives in a community, man enjoys the…
Read MoreDeath mask of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Schadow, 1804 by Thomas De Quincey I take it for granted that every person of education will acknowledge some interest in the personal history of Immanuel Kant. A great man, though in an unpopular path, must always be an object of liberal curiosity. To suppose a reader thoroughly…
Read MoreFrom Chapter IX. Of the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society: From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that…
Read Moreby Brian Kim Stefans Introduction Creators of electronic literature are progressing toward a more pervasive employment of the “ludic” — of the spirit of play inhabiting not just the writing, and not just the programming, but both in an elaborate, symbiotic combination. The tradition of “ludic” writing is well-rehearsed in criticism of electronic literature, for…
Read Moreby Justin E. H. Smith Since the Paris World Fair in 1900, the Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle exhibition has been housed together with the Galerie de Paléontologie, featuring the fossils of extinct creatures: the dinosaurs and outsized Pleistocene mammals that so enrapture the children, and that often compel them to pose…
Read MoreContrast (Order and Chaos), M.C. Escher, 1950 by Mircea Pitici The world of mathematics is a dissenter’s paradise. Although mathematical reasoning binds the mind to rigor and constrains it to obey rules of inference and to accept semantic conventions shared by the community of its practitioners, the world of mathematics at large, in society and…
Read MoreIllustration by William Propp by Ronald Hendel Wallace Stevens used to write about “the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment.” Some of his best poetry takes steps toward a supreme fiction, conjuring a sense of clarity through its oblique modernist verse. It occurred…
Read MoreThe public display of one’s parenthood is increasingly a part of the expected career path of the professional philosopher…
Read MoreOn the Pauper’s Bench, Francois Bonvin, 1864 by Dawn Holland and Jonathan Portes EU governments have individually embraced severe austerity programmes in an effort to avoid becoming the next Portugal. This column presents results from the National Institute Global Econometric Model suggesting that these individually rational polices are leading to collective folly. Keynes’ ‘paradox of…
Read MoreRecep Tayyip Erdoğan. Photograph by Serdar Kilic From New Left Review: The political upheavals of the Arab Spring and electoral victories of Islamist parties have brought a resurgence of talk about the ‘Turkish model’—a template that ‘effectively integrates Islam, democracy and vibrant economics’, according to a gushing New York Times article last year, which hailed…
Read MorePoster for Sofie Peeters’ documentary Femme de la rue by Markha Valenta When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, “the problem that has no name” was the problem of college-educated housewives sitting at home being bored to death. Today, the “problem that has no name” is more widespread, more alluring and more aggressive.…
Read MoreFrom the cover of Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell, Phoenix Fiction edition, 1986. Cover art by John Sandford 1. Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the…
Read MoreWilliam Erwin by Eugene Thacker ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own…
Read MoreSmall White Pebble Circles, Richard Long, 1987 by Jeffrey Frankel The world is seized by a debate between fiscal austerity and fiscal stimulus. Opponents of austerity worry about contractionary effects on the economy. Opponents of stimulus worry about indebtedness and moral hazard (see Corsetti 2012). Is austerity good or bad? It is as foolish to…
Read MoreElisabeth Badinter by Cécile Alduy Forget Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Naomi Wolf. Descartes gave us all that we needed to claim gender equality a long time ago. Historians rarely remember it this way, but women’s rights were dramatically (if hypothetically) advanced when, in 1619, René Descartes, snow-bound in a stove-heated room in Neuberg,…
Read MoreTV Static Abstract #8, Rick Doble by Nicholas Rombes 1. Throughout his career, but especially in writings from the 1950s gathered together as the essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” film critic André Bazin praised the potential of the cinematic image “not according to what it adds to reality but what of it…
Read MoreGoldfinger, United Artists, 1964 by Evan Johnston [BOND, JAMES]: alphabet, anatomy, [auto]biography is a character study conveyed through an index, a book length listicle-with-commentary of one of literature and film’s most distinctive characters. Author Michelle Disler starts with an alphabetical list of situations that Bond has been in throughout the Fleming novels (Approximate Number of…
Read More
