Epistemology of Lists
“I’ve come to think of the list as a particular epistemology, a way of thinking with unique qualities.”
Adam Rothstein, The State
O.K., Glass
Author Gary Shteyngart explores the world with Google Glass.
Gary Shteyngart, The New Yorker
George Saunders’s Advice to Graduates
“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.”
Joel Lovell, New York Times Magazine
Beauty and the Enlivening of the Russian Literary Imagination
A much needed origin-tracing of the phrase “beauty will save the world.”
Glenn A. Davis, The Imaginative Conservative
Science is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians
“Many of our cultural institutions cultivate a philistine indifference to science.”
Steven Pinker, The New Republic
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The Scientism of Steven Pinker
“If [what Pinker described] is scientism then obviously no sensible person should have a problem with it.”
Ross Douthat, New York Times
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UPDATE: Now Noah Millman has joined the conversation.
Mumford & Sons: Hopeless Wanderer
Self-parody at its finest.
Colin McGinn: Not the Only Masturbating Philosopher
Observations on the sometimes abhorrent masculinity of philosophy.
Nathan Schneider, Religion Dispatches
What Love Looks Like
Six micro-movies on the physics of love.
Tangible Graphics
How to Refer to the Milky Way Across the Globe
How different parts of the world refer to our home galaxy.
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic
Throw Like a Girl
The story of a new pro softball team, and how what they’re doing is “more than just a ball game.”
Ben McGrath
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cf. Iris Young’s influential feminist essay from the 80’s
ICYMI, Philip Roth, The Art of Fiction No. 84
“In an enormous commercial society that demands complete freedom of expression, the culture is maw.”
Hermione Lee, The Paris Review, Fall 1984
ICYMI, The Moral Economy of Guilt
“The curious process by which notions of sin and guilt have become both illusory and omnipresent.”
Wilfred M. McClay, First Things [Ed. note: this is a personal favorite.]