Colm Toibin is an author whose latest novel, House of Names, a retelling of a Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, has graced fine book stores everywhere. Alex Preston, writing forThe Guardian, notes, however: I say ostensibly a retelling, because House of Names gives us so much that isnt in the original trilogy (and excludes so much that […]
STEM has its roots in the humanities. If our intellectual foundations are uprooted, then, naturally, the natural sciences and their applications are in danger of withering away. This is a strong reason for the protests that followedPresident Trump’s beginning attempts to deforest our education, which might have had in mindthe prospect of recreating America in […]
Shahidha Bari must be applauding her article for the TLS, ‘In Praise of Narcissism”, which attempts a reappraisal at the figure some of us have the pleasure of finding staring us in the mirror. Many wild theories have been proposed to explain these beautiful people, including ones that have expanded their definition of narcissism to […]
Andrew J. Hoffman at Inside Higher Ed is gruff that academia is seeming to be concerned primarily about the prestige of its institutions rather than the genuine pursuit of knowledge. One form this has been taking is in the pressure faced by professors to publish only in those journals for which the warden will reward […]
The winner of the New York Times’ Third Annual Student Editorial Contest has been honored with the publication of her essay, “The Resurrection of Gilgamesh.” The author, Annie Cohen, thinks of Gilgamesh when she finds herself drowned in a sea of teenagers absorbed into flashing gadgets. Like Gilgamesh, they are too absorbed into themselves:suffering from […]
From Rousseau’s unprecedented confessions to Hong Kingston’sWarrior Women and China Men, Alex Zwerdling traces the history of the memoir in hisThe Rise of the Memoir, reviewed by Frances Wilson for the TLS. The difficulty with memoirs is that they are written to be memorable; enough so to be a steady source of profit after ones […]
Down in New York, Kathryn Schulz has penned a penetrating article exploring the literature’s obsession with the arctic regions. What is it about the North Pole besides Santa Clause and cute polar bears which could have induced writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle to take in it such interest?: Conan Doyle was twenty when he […]
April 23, 2017 at 9:21 pm
Like the enlightenment, modernity is an umbrella term that is useful for what it covers but also in danger of excluding thinkers or ideas that might deserve the label. A.C. Grayling’s new book, The Age of Genius, devotes itself in part to answer the question of what exactly we mean when speaking of modern philosophy. […]
April 22, 2017 at 10:14 pm
If there is anybody who can speak of the need to defend the right to free speech, and the need to use that right to protect what is valued in literature, then it is certainly Salman Rushdie, a man for whom the matter is one of life and death, literally. This literary icon was therefore […]
