April 16, 2017 at 7:05 pm
John Dewey’s classic book on education, “Democracy and Education,” is one of the indispensable contributions to civics that we’d do well to be revisit in our present time. A timely reminder of this appears in Inside Higher Ed, in an article by three Professors who report some of the interesting points from a daylong conference […]
April 14, 2017 at 11:41 pm
Sex sells, but whether it has been at the expense of a woman’s dignity has differed throughout the history of prostitution. Michle Roberts gives an overview of this history, starting from Mary Magdalene and going up to the bourgeoisie culture of the 19th century: By the 19th century, in bourgeois culture, the rules had hardened. […]
April 8, 2017 at 11:26 pm
It is not true that, as with our first love, our first novel will be our most memorable, written or read; in fact, it isn’t even true for our first loves, and novels deal with fiction. Nevertheless, James Reith at The Guardian has shared several books we should keep in mind next time we’re about […]
April 2, 2017 at 11:41 pm
Tariq Ali, military historian and himself a prominent firebrand for the left, has published an absorbing article on Vladimir Lenin’s literary tastes. He loved the classics. He read Ovid, Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal deeply. But Ali states that it his love for the gold might adversely have effected his politics; that is, old was not […]
April 2, 2017 at 12:11 am
Can’t connect with the divine? Tired of spinning with nothing to show for but dizziness? Good news! On Good Old (1962) Friday, Timothy O’Leary, a psychologist hailed by Nixon as the most dangerous man in America (he was number three, two was Kissinger), conducted a double blind experiment at Marsh Chapel, in whichone group of […]
March 26, 2017 at 10:34 pm
As we all know, Howard Zinn was a prominent activist under the “auspices” of Boston University, best known for hisA People’s History of the United Statesthat was popular in every sense of the word, one of the reasons for its having remainedso powerful. Understandably, on March 2, the governor of Arkansas, Kim Hendren introduced a […]
March 25, 2017 at 11:42 pm
A history of the novel, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 7, asks whether the novel is history. Another,The Value of the Novel, by Peter Boxall provides the theoretical foundation for the argument that the novel is not dead–it has only taken a novel form, one that will forecast cultural change as […]
March 19, 2017 at 10:59 pm
“Donald Trump doesn’t want you to go,” the title goes on, reminding us that it is actually not going where he wants some to go that is the real problem for those people. Hisham Matar at the New York Times shares an imaginative column with us in which he describes reading as getting to know […]
March 19, 2017 at 12:07 am
A joint Egyptian-German expedition has recently unearthed several missing pieces of the statue of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh who was the subject for another masterpiece, of which the Core students who have done their homework will remember at least a fragment–“Ozymandias,” by P.B. Shelley. The discovery is therefore literally out of this world, and, […]
March 12, 2017 at 11:52 pm
Michiko Kakutani reviews a book that is timely because it comes likes an alarm clock, How Propaganda Works, by Professor Jason Stanley. It is not boring, so promise you will not be needing to hit the snooze button; but, in fact, the book will keep you engaged while serving as a prophylaxis against the opposing […]
