Hunter-gatherers don’t live in an economic idyll but their deep appreciation of rest puts industrialised work to shame Vivek V Venkataraman In the seminar I teach about hunter-gatherers, I often ask my students whether they think life was better in the past or today. There are, of course, always a few people who insist they… Read More Lessons from the foragers
NB: An extraordinary film by one of India’s most talented film-makers. What I saw were three visual metaphors: an eclipse of the sun which never lifted; a professor entering a dark place to contemplate darkness; and an armed woman waiting silently for something unspeakable. For me, the first metaphor signified the contemporary planetary condition; the… Read More Amar Kanwar: Such A Morning
NB: The memory of these young people, their indomitable courage and humanity in resisting the criminal Nazi regime always brings tears to my eyes. They have left us something priceless: the belief in an undefeated human conscience. Goodbye Traute, and good bye again Sophie and Hans and all your comrades on the White Rose. Thank… Read More Traute Lafrenz, the last of the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance, dies aged 103
“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
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: A young friend has brought to my notice what this gizmo says about me – its a farrago of lies and half truths. This machine makes me two years older than I am (which is old enough thank you); and attributes to me new-age kind of mumbo-jumbo statements which I have never made. ChatGPT… Read More Noam Chomsky says ChatGPT is a form of High-Tech Plagiarism
John von Heyking Conversation and the “Turning Around of the Soul” One of the common criticisms of the contemporary university is that it lacks individuals unwilling or incapable of conversing. Critics such as Anthony Kronman and Stephen Miller rightly observe that there’s something about contemporary culture and the contemporary university hostile to the arts or… Read More Periagoge: Liberal Education in the Modern University
Arwa Mahdawi A recent Pew Research study has found that 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age bracket. Cue a lot of dramatic headlines about, as the Hill put it, the “larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male”. I imagine the Hill… Read More Why have young men fallen out of love with romantic relationships?
After the truth-shower 