NB: This is a simple and brilliant interview given by Camus nearly seven decades ago but with many lessons for us today, wherever we may live. It is time to think of human life in generational terms, rather than of divisive identities and factional politics. DS Published in Albert Camus, Resistance Rebellion & Death (1960)… Read More Albert Camus: The Wager of Our Generation
Nuno P. Monteiro and Fritz Bartel, eds., Before and after the fall: world politics and the end of the Cold War, Cambridge, 2021 Reviewed by Lorenzo Cladi In this volume, Nuno Monteiro and Fritz Bartel bring together a vast array of scholars. They all get to grips with the issue of continuity and change with… Read More Before and after the fall: World politics & the end of the Cold War
Raymond Geuss, Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno Reviewed by Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College This volume belongs to the genre of works that aim to tell us something about what Western philosophy is — or, in this case perhaps, about what it was — by recounting its history from ancient Greece to today (which here means,… Read More Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
Dan Shortridge Benjamin Nathans logged on to the Pulitzer Prize live announcement feed in early May just in time to hear his name read as a finalist. A split-second later, he heard his name read again, as the general nonfiction winner of one of the United States’ most prestigious arts-and-letters prizes. “It came as a complete… Read More To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
By HILLEL ITALIE NEW YORK (AP) — A posthumous and “unsparing” memoir by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, will be published this fall, publishing house Alfred A. Knopf said Sunday. “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice” is scheduled for release Oct. 21, the publisher confirmed to The Associated Press. Giuffre,… Read More Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre wrote a memoir. Months after her death, it’s coming out
Elizabeth Alker It is a sunny October afternoon and I am sitting in a long wood-panelled hallway in an old converted townhouse in London waiting to be called into the office of Paul McCartney. I am dressed in my best clothes and trying not to let nerves get the better of me. I am here to… Read More ‘The King Lear in I Am the Walrus? That came from John Cage’: Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ debt to great avant-garde composers
For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love… she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil Cathy Mason Being in love is one of the most profound experiences… Read More Why love matters most
Maya Jasanoff places Conrad as a pioneer of understanding the forces that shape the modern world ‘Konrad was supposed to stay in Congo for three years, but after just one trip up and down the river between Kinshasa and Kisangani he quit. He saw in Congo a European regime of appalling greed, violence, and hypocrisy,… Read More The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
Mario Praz (1896-1982) was an Italian-born critic of art & literature, and scholar of English literature. His best-known book, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (The Romantic Agony, 1933) written in 1930 was a comprehensive survey of the erotic and morbid themes that characterized European authors of the late 18th &… Read More Mario Praz: The Romantic Agony (1933)
The IDF-induced famine in Gaza became a Live Aid moment; weirdly, starvation depoliticised the genocide, bleaching it into a humanitarian cause that writers could get behind Mukul Kesavan Why have Western writers and public intellectuals been so feeble and belated in their response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza? The general public can be forgiven for… Read More Guilty silence
After the truth-shower 