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 10, 2017 at 11:30 am
Greetings, scholars! We hope spring break is treating you well. Here on the blog, we couldn’t rest until we had compiled the choicest links for your perusal. Or something like that. The 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen continues with New Yorker writer Anthony Lane’s review of the author’s last–and unfinished–novel, Sanditon. Actor […]
March 3, 2017 at 11:30 am
Good afternoon, scholars! Before you shove off for spring break, we hope you’ll take the time to read this week’s links. The earliest-known image of Confucius was found in the tomb of the Marquis of Haihun, who briefly (and we mean brief–we’re talking less than a month) reigned as emperor of China in 74 B.C. […]
February 24, 2017 at 11:30 am
Hello, Corelings! Enjoying the uncommonly good weather? We’ve compiled some equally good links for this week’s round-up that might strike your fancy. Ipsa Dixit, by American composer Kate Soper, explores works by Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Wittgenstein, Jenny Holtzer, and Lydia Davis in an evening of theatrical chamber music. Alex Ross gets to the bottom of […]
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 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 […]
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time, W.E.B. Du Bois; and he rightly places him in the activist tradition whose standard bearer, Barack Obama, has been replaced by somebody who we can barely stand, representing the opposing tradition.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 […]
January 22, 2017 at 11:48 pm
(It is a felicity that the elision in the title allows one to pronounce it as ‘Whatever persuasion’, so that it suggests at once something peculiar about Austen but also about ourselves, making it then something not peculiar but universal, acknowledged or not).Dr. Looser (LOE-sir) at the TLS has very likely bemused some readers in […]
December 11, 2016 at 9:48 pm
As our understanding of Artificial Intelligence and its relation to our own intelligence is slowly becoming illuminated, one cannot help but to speculate whether machines of the future will be able to replace our role in certain activities. And some feel immediately slighted when such functions are also one’s dearly cherished. Many of these involve […]
November 27, 2016 at 4:02 pm
Dr. Daveena Tauber at McSweeney’s has found it necessary in light of the new darkness inaugurated by our jurassic president to revise her paper grading rubric. She wants to make America grade again, Trump’s way. Now, the class clown will now find himself valedictorian.If it could make Trump president and give success to all of […]
