November 2, 2016 at 11:50 am
Today at the office, prof. Sassan Tabatabai handed students this sonnet by Billy Collins. We encourage you to read it!
October 31, 2016 at 12:52 am
It is wrongly supposed that the Dark Ages were a period of stunted growth for the arts and sciences, until civilization received another growth spurt starting the Renaissance, and came fully within the limelight during the Enlightenment. That some of our candidates’ candidly brusque remarks are often derogated as medieval is evidence that we may […]
October 16, 2016 at 12:49 am
That “Canterbury” contains “Cant-“, and that “cant” shares a precarious assonance with another word, suggests that one of our most literate bards and bawds, Chaucer, might have anticipated Trump’s latest perversion. This possibility was recently illuminated by Constance Grady at Vox. Or, less likely, Trump might have been paying tribute in his comment to some […]
October 8, 2016 at 1:09 pm
One reason why it is necessary to keep “pushing” the “classic books” is that they strengthen the things that remain. For one of our present monomanias is for “innovation,” against which the classical works provide much needed traction.Without it, it is easy to feel one is living a chopping-block mode of existence, bound to cut […]
October 4, 2016 at 3:05 pm
In this corner, the cries for diversity are heard so regularly, that one can’t help but to feel they are unified into some kind of chant. Meanwhile, the coroner is busy trying to figure out why a tiny but vicious minority of those marching is taking aim at the canonical paladins, otherwise called Dead White […]
September 26, 2016 at 8:53 am
In the opening line of Michael Kazin’s article Prophet and Loss, the author asks, “Does Karl Marx still matter?” He directs the question to those readers interested in Gareth Stedman Jones’ new book Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, and addresses the question in a book review-esque article. Both Kazin and Jones acknowledge Marx’s failures to […]
September 22, 2016 at 4:53 pm
For several reasons, Philosophy departments in the United States have traditionally recommended a safe distance from Nietzsche. One is the prose style, which shows a penchant less for analysis and more for Dionysus. Another is hygiene: the charge of anti-Semitism has stuck to him like a bad scent, despite the attempts by expositors, most notably […]
September 17, 2016 at 2:30 pm
“No, the Internet Has Not Killed the Printed Book. Most People Still Prefer Them,” Daniel Victor of the New York Times assures us in the title of his latest. And also invites us to ponder whether the slip in grammar might not indicate that the Internet has killed or made moribund something else: literacy. Citing […]
August 1, 2016 at 11:15 am
Erin Rubin (Core ’08, CAS ’10) brings to our attention this article at the BBC website, about “Syria’s secret library”: When a place has been besieged for years and hunger stalks the streets, you might have thought people would have little interest in books. But enthusiasts have stocked an underground library in Syria with volumes […]
