It had been so long since I last pulled out the Snakes & Ladders set that the cardboard box had warped. I’d put it away in that attic ages ago, and if the weather hadn’t been the way it was, and I hadn’t needed distraction, it never would’ve occurred to me to take it out.
Read MoreIt had been twenty centuries since He’d last walked upon the Earth, and it was in the ninth year of the new reign that He quietly appeared again late afternoon on a cold Christmas Eve.
Read MoreFlourishing in the northern provinces, the Balkan False Narcissus (Crinum ponticum) stands out as one of Euxinova’s most notable bulbous perennials.
Read MoreIf Beckett’s “changing tense” was postmodernism’s last gasp then perhaps it first spluttered into life with the culmination of his great aesthetic transition.
Read MoreOn November 19, Prime Minister Edi Rama, Minister of Interior Affairs Saimir Tahiri, and media entrepreneur Carlo Bollino opened Bunk’Art 2, an exhibition space managed by the latter one.
Read MoreIt seems to me that the big social media sites, while perhaps blowing up more and bigger filter bubbles, can scarcely be blamed for the confirmation bias.
Read MoreFilms and novels usually portray alien invasions, not simply as instances of tribal aggression on the part of such phrenological curiosities as the Klingons in Star Trek or the Sith Lords in Star Wars, but as evacuations from dying planets.
Read MoreWhat do you think Ishmael’s life is like after the last page of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick? What ultimately happens to that survivor of the ill-fated Pequod? Where does he go, what does he do, how does he end his days? The “scandal of fiction” is that although these questions make sense, they are meaningless.
Read MoreThe West Wing, Warner Bros. Television, 1999-2006 by G.K. Chesterton It grows plainer, every day, that those of us who cling to crumbling creeds and dogmas, and defend the dying traditions of the Dark Ages, will soon be left alone defending the most obviously decaying of all those ancient dogmas: the idea called Democracy. It…
Read MoreWhen medievalists Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro grew exasperated with the academic publishing industry, they started their own alternative, punctum books.
Read MoreThe Thirteenth Floor, Columbia Pictures, 1999 From The Atlantic: Gefter: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they? Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my…
Read MoreThe question is not whether humans are on a crash course with misery and extinction but how we as individuals relate to our membership in a species and chart a path for ourselves between now and our personal demise.
Read MoreHer visitors would almost immediately fall silent, absorbing the sight of the fading gold and pink garment artfully arranged upon her wall, the only adornment, in fact, which happened to grace any of the room’s walls.
Read MoreIn a review essay in the September 5th, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, professor Adam Kirsch poses a problem that is very similar in certain respects to the problem radical general semantics poses for us.
Read MoreThe fairy tale, that one single act of decision at the ballot box—supposedly someday in November—maybe the 8th or 28th has bearing or meaning, is coming to an end for many believers.
Read MoreThere is no living American poet who deserves the characterization of being a prophet more than Bob Dylan. Both a product of his land and his land a product of him, Dylan the prophet has been Jeremiah by the rivers of Babylon
Read MoreA star sends its light through space, and this passes through the strong gravitational field of the sun. The field bends the light, so the position of the star changes.
Read MoreIn the week leading up to Friday, September 2, 2016, I accompanied my father in his transition to death. I came back and he did not. I am not yet old, and was only there to help him across.
Read MoreI have to admit, the tango was no evident musical choice for a film about a Belgian pub. One would rather expect to hear schlagers or chansons, exactly what we tried to do, but somehow they did not fit in, or perhaps they fitted just too well.
Read MoreBalliol College, Monday.—Read aloud my Essay on Equality to the Master. It began: “Treat all men as your equals, especially the rich.” The Master commented on this sentence. He said, “Very ribald, Prince Hamlet, very ribald.”
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