August 2011

Second Soul, Episode 5, Season 1 of The Outer Limits, CBS, 1995 From New Left Review: Equality currently functions as a shared ideal in both political rhetoric and philosophy. No politician calls for ‘a more unequal society’, and within political theory philosophers of almost every persuasion advocate some form of...

by Deniz Igan and Prachi Mishra Did anti-regulation lobbying fuel the subprime crisis? This column shows that there is a strong relationship between financial industry lobbying and favourable financial regulation legislation. It argues that the financial industry fought, and defeated, measures that might have curbed some of the reckless...

Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia | by Colson Whitehead

Grantland

I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze had helped my game ever since I started...

The Lion King, walt Disney Pictures, 1994 From Bookslut: “When nude/ I turned my back because he likes the back. /He moved onto me. // Everything I know about love and its necessities/ I learned in that one moment/ when I found myself/ thrusting my little burning red backside...

Quentin Blake by Lee Konstantinou In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Why We Can’t Teach Students to Love Reading,” Alan Jacobs argues that “‘deep attention’ reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit.” The inevitable minority status of deep reading “has...

by Russell Bennetts Carrie Pitzulo is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of West Georgia. Her current book, Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy provides a social history of the magazine.            Berfrois How radical was Playboy for postwar America?             Pitzulo I’m...

by Justin E. H. Smith Jaron Lanier, of virtual-reality fame, was permitted to hold forth a few years ago in a Discover blog space on the topic of ‘morphing’ in molluscs. The result is messy: Lanier introduces the analogy between cephalopod intelligence and extraterrestrial intelligence three times, each time...

Flann O’Brien, Brian O’Toole From Boston Review: “A really funny book,” was James Joyce’s verdict on At Swim-Two-Birds, the comic masterpiece by his compatriot Brian O’Nolan, a.k.a. Flann O’Brien. Graham Greene said he read it “with excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china...

Four note chords by Dmitri Tymoczko Two hundred years ago, there were no CDs or MP3s and the primary way to preserve your music was to write it down. Not surprisingly, notated composition was a culturally central activity: Roughly 20,000 people are said to have attended Beethoven’s funeral, a non-negligible...

Lucinda Williams by Joe Linker “I am here, and there is nothing to say,” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing” (Silence, 1961). “If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment.” So we boarded Line 15, ancient music now turned...

Kent Wang by Gordon Mathews Chungking Mansions is a dilapidated 17-story structure full of cheap guesthouses, restaurants, and shops of all kinds located in the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district, which encompasses some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Chungking Mansions has been famous in recent...

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich | by Warren E. Buffett

The New York Times

Our leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting....

Photograph by Rowland Williams by Samuel Jay Keyser Ed Schein, one of the foremost authorities on organizational structure—he coined the term “corporate culture”—sent me an e-mail commenting on my book, Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows: When visiting CEO’s would tell me how badly MIT was run,...

Walt Disney Pictures, via From Philosophy Now: “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation” Rainer Maria Rilke. “Your task is not to...

Real poetry originates in the guts and only flowers in the head...

From Life and Health, illustration by Phil Kirkland,  1972 From The American Scholar: “Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors” and “Drugmakers Pulling Plug on Free Pens, Mugs & Pads” read headlines in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Health Blog at the end of 2008 after, in...