March 2012

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Once again, we can see that almost the entire world is trembling with the expectation of change. It looks like the world is refusing to suffocate itself with the single philosophy and single ideology that is already there for the last 20 years. Events are...

DC Comics From Sign and Sight: The question of pro or contra the net or “intellectual property” is not being decided according to political parties but social criteria. It is important to understand that the lines drawn in the internet debate cut across all political orientations. There are internet...

by Volker M. Welter In 1992, when I was working as an architectural historian for an architectural firm located in Berlin, I stumbled across the name of architect Ernst L. Freud. At that time, my task was to conduct research for an architectural historic report on a large country...

In the 1450s there lived a boy whose favorite pastime it was to roam the hills of Tuscany. He would dwell in vineyards and olive groves that offered up an assortment of brightly plumed birds, peeping insects, and fragrant plants for contemplation. On his lengthier peregrinations, he developed a...

From The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Yellow Bird, 2009 From Columbia Journalism Review: For a profession whose entire raison d’être is communication, American journalists sure have done a lousy job of explaining why the slow-motion disintegration of the business model upon which their livelihoods have depended for the...

Vladimir Putin’s one great achievement is the restoration of bureaucratic order after its near destruction by Gorbachev and privatisation by Yeltsin. Yet the end game is fast approaching, and the longer Putin clings on, the more likely he will be instead remembered for letting greedy friends and bureaucrats run...

From The Millions: David Lynn began his Editor’s Notes for the Autumn 2004 issue of The Kenyon Review with some necessary questions: “How much is a fine story worth? What monetary value does a superb poem possess? How much — and this is the inexorable point — should authors...

Rosetta, ARP Sélection, 1999 by R.D. Crano Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, by Joseph Mai, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 156 pp. Since the Dardenne brothers first broke onto the international cinema scene with La promesse (1996) a decade and a half ago, their work has enjoyed immense critical acclaim...

by John Van Houdt Van Houdt From Kant to Husserl, and now to your work, the move to transcendental philosophy has, for the most part, taken place in times of “crisis.” For Kant it was the potential failure of classical accounts of rationality at the skeptical hands of David...

I wrote recently that Borges's fiction is often structured around scenes whose drama derives from the structural logic of the cinema. And some time ago, in a reading of a number of stories from Historia universal de la infamia and Ficciones I suggested that their guiding logic was often...

This February marked the 350th anniversary of an important but forgotten war: the Sino-Dutch War of 1661-1662. The Dutch, who’d defeated the British, the Portuguese and the Spanish, whose guns and military practices were famous throughout Europe, found themselves outfought, out-led and outmaneuvered by a Chinese warlord named Koxinga,...