A timely guide to the Greek philosopher – and rival to the Stoics – who saw freedom from anxiety as the ultimate goal Julian Baggini Epicurus’s distinctive feature is his insistence that pleasure is the source of all happiness and is the only truly good thing. Hence the modern use of “epicurean” to mean gourmand.… Read More Living for Pleasure by Emily Austin: an Epicurean guide to happiness
Work and leisure, deemed opposite, are both caught up in the contemporary socio-economic pressure to be productive; time off, forced into servicing respite or distraction, is a commodified entity. Could a universal right to ‘otium’, the ancient concept of time, free from worldly concerns, create the opportunity to work on oneself through oneself? Jean-Miguel Pire… Read More Taking the time to exist
The late Marxist intellectual Gáspár Miklós Tamás captured Europe’s disorientation after the Cold War. By Anton Jäger In the late 1920s the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth took a series of trips through the Soviet Union. The timing was duly symbolic. Ten years earlier the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsarist regime and won the subsequent civil war.… Read More Gáspár Tamás; prophet of post-fascism
… there is a more foundational reason why DeSantis and the far right are attacking education: it is the means by which our young people are made into citizens. Schools and universities are laboratories of aspiration, places where young people cultivate their own capacities, expose themselves to the experiences and worldviews of others, and learn… Read More Schools and universities are ground zero for America’s culture war
“A feeling grew on me that people didn’t talk about the things that really matter in human lives“ First posted January 26, 2018 Belarusian journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work documenting the lives of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens. Her latest project, about love, is the… Read More ‘Only love can save those who are infected with anger.’ Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich speaks to Staffan Julén
NB: I can think of several ‘cultural organisations’, national-level leaders, news channels and ‘national security’ agencies for whom pathological lying has been a way of life, the sole purpose of their existence. Will they get a mental health check? Even if they do, they will get what we call a ‘clean chit’. We’re all very… Read More Pathological lying could finally be getting attention as a mental disorder
First posted June 19, 2016 Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism by Judy Wajcman Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age by Bernard E. Harcourt Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art by Virginia Heffernan Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Mood and… Read More In the Depths of the Digital Age: Edward Mendelson reviews five books on psychological life in the age of the internet / We Are Hopelessly Hooked: Jacob Weisberg
By Albert Parry CENSORSHIP existed even be fore literature, say the Russians. And, we may add, cen sorship being older, literature has to be craftier. Hence, the new and re markably viable underground press in the Soviet Union called samizdat. The word is a play on Gosizdat, which is a telescoping of Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo, the… Read More Samizdat: Russia’s Underground Press (1970)
“I still believe in paradise. But now at least I know it’s not some place you can look for. Because it’s not where you go. It’s how you feel for a moment in your life when you’re a part of something. And if you find that moment…it lasts forever.” Dario Feat – Voices We sailed… Read More Dario G Feat. Vanessa Quinones – Voices
POETRY And it was at that age…Poetry arrivedin search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know whereit came from, from winter or a river.I don’t know how or when,no, they were not voices, they were notwords, nor silence,but from a street I was summoned,from the branches of night,abruptly from the others,among violent firesor returning… Read More Pablo Neruda: Poetry
After the truth-shower 