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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
October 14, 2016 at 2:40 am
If anyone has a story that can justly be called BUnique and BUtiful, then one of our Core first-year students, Abbey Janeira, has certainly made her own a strong candidate. She was profiled in a recent article at BU Today: Abbey Janeira (CAS ’20) is used to facing challenges. As an eighth grader, she was […]
October 3, 2016 at 2:44 pm
Our “Lord Nelson” — Prof. Nelson, director of Core, on sabbatical this year while the ship is being helmed by Acting Director Prof. Diana Wylie — is in Ireland, away from the academic high-mindedness (and occasional hijinks) of the Core office. Thinking that we wouldn’t want her to miss out, we wrote her a quick […]
