Vivian Gornick Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know… Read More Albert Camus on Tour
From Heidegger’s Nazism to Habermas’s Zionism, the suffering of the ‘Other’ is of little consequence. GAZA casualties live statistics We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians over the past century Hamid Dabashi Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon,… Read More Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt / South Africa is testing the west’s claim to moral superiority
First posted June 30, 2015 The Old Astronomer to His Pupil Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of howWe are working to completion, working on from then to… Read More The Old Astronomer to His Pupil / Stunning New Footage Of Earth
Greg Conti It has quickly become a commonplace that American elite higher education is in a more perilous position than it has been in recent memory. Long-standing conservative discontent has crystallized as a result of recent events; multiple proposals targeting universities’ pocketbooks have been floated by lawmakers in the past weeks. Republican officials have made… Read More The Rise of the Sectarian University (in the USA)
First posted December 12, 2011 How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps: It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors A naked man among a multitude who are dressed A mind living in sin with the soul… Read More The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
China feels the country isn’t patriotic enough. A new law aims to change that Hong KongCNN — On a brisk December day, junior high school students in Fuzhou, southeast China, converged at a country park to study the thoughts of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Unfurling a red banner that declared their outing a “walking classroom of politics and… Read More Nationalism = Enforced patriotism
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was born in Quhafa, some 120 km from Cairo, near Tanta, Egypt on July 10, 1945. He died on 5 July 2010 in Cairo as a result of an unidentified virus infection and was buried in his birthplace, on the same day. He was 67. At the age of 12, Abu Zayd was imprisoned for allegedly sympathising with the Muslim Brotherhood. After receiving… Read More The religious persecution of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1945-2010) / Mahmoud Mohammed Taha & the Second Message of Islam
Before me there was no time, after me there will be none With me it is born, with me it will die Daniel von Czepko, Sexcenta Monidisticha Sapientum III, II (1655) the feeble artifice of an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics . . . A word on the title: I am not unaware… Read More J. L. Borges: A New Refutation of Time
The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why Alexander T Englert As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and… Read More Kurt Gödel to his mother: We’ll meet again
By ANDREW JONES It may be a new year, but America remains mired in a myriad of national dysfunction. The list is endless: A close ally continues to an immoral human rights disaster, Republican madness is ramping up at the behest of Donald Trump and we suffered through yet another return by the father of North and Saint West who… Read More America’s addiction to awful people
After the truth-shower 