Claire Messud at the NYRB: Between The Story of My Teeth and Lost Children Archive, Luiselli wrote a slim, memorable volume of nonfiction, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions(2017), expanded from an essay that appeared in Freeman’s magazine in 2016. (This was her sec … | Continue reading
John Gray at The New Statesman: Perhaps most intriguingly, Diderot’s near-contemporary the Marquis de Sade used materialist philosophy not only to attack religion but also to subvert the optimistic visions of the Encyclopedists. Unlike Diderot, who never resolved the conflict bet … | Continue reading
Slip Liquid alignment of fabric and outer ………… thigh. Slip. Which mimics the thing it’s meant to allow. ………… Passage of air on either side of the tongue whose meat ………… as if to thicken the likeness of substance and sound ………… meets just that plot of upper palate behind the teeth … | Continue reading
Heini Lehtinen at Raven & Wood: The Dialogue Advisory Group, which works in conflict areas such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Iraq and Basque Country, facilitates political dialogue to reduce violence. In an interview, Ram Manikkalingam illustrates the locations … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber One of the philosophical tools that seems utterly obvious to me is the so-called “use/mention distinction”. Because it strikes me as so obvious, it is always baffling to me that people seem to have such trouble with it. Simply put, the use/mention distinction is … | Continue reading
Teach the Children About the Cycles . …… —on a poem by Gary Snyder in which Snyder is ……… visited by Lew Welsh Dead Lew comes to Gary in a poem and tells the thing that must be taught, he says, ……….. Teach the children about the cycles. The life cycles. He may as well have… | Continue reading
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is a wonderfully interesting book, and is less 'laisser faire' than is commonly supposed. | Continue reading
Wolfgang Buttress. The Hive at Kew Gardens, 2016. “…The intensity of sound and light is controlled by the vibrations of honeybees in an actual hive at Kew that is connected to the sculpture…” More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf After an anxious and grey winter, the gloom of an unraveling economy, topped by the ominous beating of war drums, spring arrived in Punjab and Lahore’s academies and activists put aside their concerns to celebrate Women’s International Day on March 8. Amidst the bl … | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford In 1987, Anderson University, an Evangelical school in Indiana, acquired 140 works by the artist Warner Sallman, including Head of Christ. You may have never heard of Sallman, but in terms of sheer sales and presence, his Head of Christ makes him the most popula … | Continue reading
Saw this hunting blind while walking in the woods near Raas last week. | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey We are all the animals and none of them. It is so often said that poetry and science both seek truth, but perhaps they both seek hedges against it. —Thalia Field A handsome bearded man leads a row of eager young ducklings who mistake him for their mother. Many of u … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow It is fashionable to say that great wine is made in the vineyard. There is a lot of truth to that slogan but in fact wine is made by a complex assemblage with various factors influencing the final product. Last month I argued that the wine quality revolution in t … | Continue reading
by Richard Passov Milton Friedman, in his essay The Methodology of Positive Economics[1], first published in 1953, often reprinted, by arguing against burdening models with the need for realistic assumptions helped lay the foundation for mathematical economics. The virtue of a mo … | Continue reading
by Richard Passov On the night of December 8th, 1864, George Boole, 49 years of age, in the grips of pneumonia, expired. He left a wife, Mary, and five daughters. Unfortunately, Mary had always carried two of his beliefs: the health benefits of long walks and the healing powers o … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss What is it about immigration that causes us to lose our minds? I’m not even referring to the absurd spectacle of toilets overflowing at national monuments and hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay. In theory, at least, there’s a reason for tha … | Continue reading
by Gerald Dworkin Having taught Philosophy for 46 years in three Universities—two State and one private—and never taught a Critical Thinking course one might have some questions about my choice of topic. My response is two-fold. First, there is a sense in which no matter what the … | Continue reading