November 2010

From New Humanist: Nietzsche himself turns out to have been a likable sort of guy. Despite his over-the-top persona as an “antichrist”, he always “remained a Christian”, according to Young, if not theologically then at least “emotionally.” And despite his hatred of slipshod scholarship, he had no truck with...

Image via This Isn’t Happiness From The New Inquiry: Literature’s undeniable resemblance to gossip illuminates what is most useful about it, what causes literary works to endure. In her 1982 essay “In Praise of Gossip” in The Hudson Review, Patricia Meyer Spacks claims that gossip can function as “healing...

Funniest Pages: A tasting menu from the most hilarious magazine ever | by Craig Lambert

Harvard Magazine

Contrary to the romanticized image of a solitary artist forging brilliant creations in inspired isolation—Franz Kafka, say—most great works of art emerge from a group...

by Fabio Camilletti   This essay analyses the relationship between the uncanny and time by focusing on the notion of ‘time-slip’ as reflected in three American novels of the 1970s: Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return and Stephen King’s The Shining. Through a comparative analysis of these...

by Russell Bennetts Nick Salvato is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Cornell University. His first book, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance will be published by Yale University Press at the end of November.  Currently Nick is working on a second book, tentatively entitled Performing Waste Management: A...

From The Smithsonian: Some of the most successful zombie-masters are fungi from the genus Ophiocordyceps. The parasites infest many kinds of arthropods—from butterflies to cockroaches—but it is among ants that the fungi’s ability to control other beings’ behavior is most apparent. One prototypical scenario is found in Costa Rica,...

Brenda Song as Christy Lee in The Social Network From New York Review of Books: How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say...

From The Philosophers’ Magazine: If “liberal” is a dirty word then Martha Nussbaum is one of the most profane philosophers alive. An unashamed champion of the value of liberal democracy, Nussbaum is also an enthusiastic advocate of providing the kind of humanistic education that prepares students to be good...