March 12, 2017 at 12:32 am
“Anxiousness reminds us of existence; happiness momentarily forgets it existed.” The power of ‘it’ in that wonderful bit of existentialism comes in the ambiguity of its reference, and so reminding us of the closeness between ‘anxiety’ and ‘existence’, almost anagrams. One of the appeals of the existentialists, then, comes in their trying to work out […]
It is one of the most valuable purposes of reading imaginative literature that it allows the reader to sympathize with the values of a culture different from his or her own. Having done so, memory, strengthened by the force of narrative, will also preserve those values. Peter E. Gordon therefore aptly begins his review of […]
February 26, 2017 at 9:39 pm
Eric Ormsby at Literary Reviewengages in his latest review with Christopher de Bellaigue’sThe Islamic Enlightenment. The relationship between the two has not been easy, but that it has been unrequited for either is a misimpression that has gained popularity in some circles, namely populist ones. That is too bad, because de Bellaigue argues that the […]
February 25, 2017 at 11:08 pm
Graphcore is a start-up company that has recently secured $30m “to deliver massive acceleration for machine learning.” One of its latest findings has been posted by Mark Frauenfelder at boingboing: “brain scans” of Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), which is likea rudimentary brain that can performbasic processes related to learning and memory. Here’s an image […]
February 19, 2017 at 11:10 pm
One of the prime tasks of the literary critic is conservation; conservation of a tradition that has been formed in part by the books that have come from that very tradition. Yet this is a function that is wanting, alerts Professor Tony E. Afejuku, in African Literary Criticism.There are too many books in the inventory […]
February 18, 2017 at 7:15 pm
Steve Bannon (good name) believes in a cyclical theory of history. We do not have the evidence for it, which is just the point, sincethe argument then becomes circular. The nice thing about cycles is that it suggests revolution, something we like here; the bad thingis thatBannon feels perhaps that he is the spearhead of […]
February 12, 2017 at 9:54 pm
Blake Seitz at The Weekly Standard reviews Portraits of Shakespeare by Katherine Duncan-Jones, an absorbing study, we are told, by an author who flouts the rule that tells us we cannot judge a book by its cover. Or if we cannot judge Hamlet from its cover, we can at least make a judgment about its […]
February 10, 2017 at 1:05 am
It is apt that a man whose life mission was incomplete should have biographers . devoted to making it seem more wholesome. A recent review by Benjamin Kunkel at The Nation .tells us that the latest such attempt, Marx’s Revenge .by Gareth Stedman Jones, tries to have us seeMarx as a relic of the nineteenth […]
February 1, 2017 at 7:22 pm
Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse at the 3quarksdaily find occasion in the recent intense disagreement over the crowd size attending the Trump inauguration to proffer the values of a liberal education. We understand this is a convenient pretext, because anything in the news would have allowed them to do just the same, and almost everything […]
January 28, 2017 at 11:19 pm
Robert McCrum at The Guardian writes appreciatively of a figure whose kind is desperately wanting in our present time, W.E.B. Du Bois; and he rightly places him in the activist tradition whose standard bearer, Barack Obama, has been replaced by somebody who we can barely stand, representing the opposing tradition. It is not only for […]
