NB: This literary enormity is very serious, but I have no idea whether the academic community will take it seriously. I have taught for many years, but these past few weeks have made me more concerned than ever before about what AI is doing to the minds and mentalities of our younger generation. It’s bad… Read More The Commonwealth Short Story Prize is Dead
Academia has become unrooted from pedagogy. William Deresiewicz That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking… Read More Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching!
NB: I found typewritten copies of these two prose poems among my parent’s papers, which are so rich and diverse that my mind can’t take it all in. DS (The Gestalt prayer is a 56-word statement by psychotherapist Fritz Perls taken as an expression of Gestalt therapy as a life model of which Perls was a founder) I do my thing and… Read More The Gestalt Prayer (1969)
Nothing can stop Germany’s moral panic over antisemitism It would be hard to surpass the absurd spectacle of a Jewish philosopher being blocked from speaking at a German Holocaust memorial because he intended to say that the lessons of “never again” should be applied universally. And yet such perverse distortions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’ have… Read More Bad memories
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut The Spanish title of Labatut’s book is Un Verdor Terrible – roughly, A Terrible Greening NB: This is an astonishing piece of writing, at once simple and deeply thought-provoking. The style is reminiscent of Borges, and the philosophical citation that comes to mind is this one from… Read More A Terrible Greening
A true believer until the end Vladimir Tismaneanu The celebrated Marxist philosopher, literary theorist, and cultural critic Georg Lukács, born in April of 1885, died fifty years ago on June 4, 1971. His first political job, in 1919, was People’s Commissar for Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. His last—in November of 1956, during the… Read More What Remains? Georg Lukács’ Dialectical Wager
By Maria Popova “Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe,” Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) wrote to his boyhood friend, rallying his own resilience as he began losing his hearing. A year later, shortly after completing his Second Symphony, he sent his brothers a stunning letter about the joy of suffering… Read More Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’
Ron Srigley Universities, in the interest of increasing enrollments (= money), are willing to flatter you and your children so shamelessly … “During one class a couple of years ago, I dimmed the lights in order to show a clip of an interview. The moment the lights went down I saw dozens and dozens of… Read More Dear Parents: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University But Don’t
Bhagat Ram Talwar, one of the greatest spies of the Second World War SILVER: The spy who fooled the Nazis by Mihir Bose Navtej Sarna Spies, by definition, live in a world of grey, but the life of Bhagat Ram Talwar, alias Silver, seems to have been exceptionally shadowy. Born a Hindu Pathan in the… Read More An unlikely Prince of Spies
AI and the crisis of meaning Alexander Stern “It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet… Read More Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse
After the truth-shower 