There seemed a certainty in degradation: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the… Read More Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges
Adam Tooze As far as we are currently able to judge, our best chance to halt the further escalation of the climate crisis through decarbonization of the economy depends on electricity and electrification. Given the current horizon of technological expectations, electric power and electric technology offer us the best chance of reconciling the insatiable desire… Read More Repowering the world: the challenge of electrification
“Reading should be a form of happiness” – Jorge Luis Borges IT’S HARD to fall asleep in lecture when you’re on the edge of your seat. Borges kept his students perched in this position throughout his 1966 course on English literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and now keeps us there as we read… Read More Michael Duffy: Jorge Luis Borges’s Course on English Literature
With the help of new archaeological approaches, our picture of young lives in the Palaeolithic is now marvellously vivid April Nowell The sun rises on the Palaeolithic, 14,000 years ago, and the glacial ice that once blanketed Europe continues its slow retreat. In the daylight, a family begins making its way toward a cave at… Read More Children of the Ice Age
Jafar Panahi after the ban MARK KROTOV Jafar Panahi (director). No Bears. 2022.Jafar Panahi: Interviews. Edited by Drew Todd. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. JAFAR PANAHI’S NO BEARS opens with a long, 270-degree pan around the T-intersection of two streets. We know the action takes place sometime in the post-pandemic present because in the background of the frame… Read More An Entire Society Exists Within Me
How atomic doomsday experiments, fuelled by Cold War fears, shaped, then shook ecologists’ faith in self-healing nature Laura J Martin When Hurricane Fiona flooded regions of Puerto Rico with up to 30 inches of rain in September last year, the island was still recovering from hurricanes Irma and Maria, two catastrophic storms in 2017 during which nearly 3,000… Read More Disturbance
The beloved author’s books are being edited by their publisher to suit contemporary sensibilities. That robs us of the author’s vision—and any sense of history. By Katha Pollitt The United States can be a harsh place to be a child. There are guns galore and bullies in school. Suicide is on the rise, homelessness is rampant,… Read More Let Kids Read Roald Dahl’s Books the Way He Wrote Them
A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country…The river of bile on which Sharlet fights to stay afloat courses from one end of the country to the other. By Elizabeth D. Samet The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Undertow, plunged me into a vertiginous fever-dream. It induced a physiological response… Read More The Center Cannot Hold
Nostalgia is tremendously shot, and terrifically acted by Favino. It challenges the idea of “nostalgia” as broadcast in the title: it isn’t simply that nostalgia is delusional, or that the past wasn’t as great as it appears when viewed through rose-tinted spectacles. It is that there is no past and present Peter Bradshaw Mario Martone’s… Read More Nostalgia review – bittersweet crime yarn also homecoming love-letter to Naples
NB: An interesting essay. However, Heyking seems to conflate China and ‘Asia’. DS John von Heyking In order to cut through the two false alternatives – “catch up” and “social harmony” – I appeal to the original figure of Western liberal education, Socrates. Socrates indeed embodies the individual as it has been transmitted throughout the… Read More The Figure of Socrates and its Significance for Liberal Education in Asia
