June 2012

The Simpsons, 20th Century Fox From Philosophy Now: To know that it is 4:30 is to be at 4:30, and also to be looking on 4:30 as if from a temporal outside. So in subjecting time to timing, we seem to have succeeded in stepping to one side of...

It might not seem perplexing that a sexualised aberration of innocence deserves to be protected from criminal prosecution, but consider a prominent incident in the city-state of Singapore, where 44 men were recently charged with having paid sex with a minor via an online vice ring.

by Andrew Goldstone What are the eras of publishing history? Are they literary eras? I’d like to expand on our discussion of John Thompson’s sociology of contemporary publishing by posing some literary-historical questions. In his post on Thompson, Lee Konstantinou framed some questions about contemporary book publication and promotion...

Plant ethics shares with veganism a strong commitment to justice, which is to say, to the reduction of violence humans perpetrate against other living beings. It is by no means a threat to or an invalidation of veganism. Rather, plant ethics is an open invitation to fine-tune our dietary...

Photograph by Michael Caroe Anderson From The New York Review of Books: Last time I was in Willesden Green I took my daughter to visit my mother. The sun was out. We wandered down Brondesbury Park towards the high road. The “French Market” was on, which is a slightly...

My problem is that I don’t care about losing things. Last month, at a restaurant, I left a rough grey scarf that my husband gave me on a rainy evening shortly after we began sleeping with each other, shortly after we fell in love—the scarf that, even after warm...

Look Mickey, Roy Lichtenstein, 1961 From The New York Review of Books: The first half of the 1960s was the apogee of what might be termed the Age of Cool—as defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and...

From London Review of Books: Good reporters go hunting for nouns. They want the odd verb too, but the main thing is the nouns, especially the proper ones, the who, what and where. The thing British schoolchildren call a ‘naming word’ was, for Hemingway, a chance to reveal what...

Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in. I would prefer to have been a sickly child. I always love it when I read a biography of some key Modernist or neurasthenic Victorian and it says, “So-and-so was a sickly...

Writing strategy textbooks often move us quickly through the rhetorical modes before introducing argument, where we are invited to pick a topic of interest, something we’re passionate about, but then are asked to write a research paper, as opposed to a personal essay, presumably to distinguish between mere opinion...

Mobile Flea Market on Schillinger Road, Mobile, Alabama From Oxford American: Joe sells records at the Mobile Flea Market on Schillinger Road.  Row C, table 12; Saturdays and Sundays (but not before noon). “Psychedelic” Joe as most people know him. An increasingly squiggly Moby Grape tattoo on his arm, 8...

Most obviously, writing a novel in which Anne Frank in invoked in any way necessitates that Auslander’s work engages with the difficult ethical questions attendant on any fictional discussions of the Holocaust: questions which have been considered vital ever since Theodor Adorno’s claim that it would be barbaric to...

Detail of Hypathia of Alexandria, from The School of Athens, Raphael, 1509-1510 From Eurozine: The German Pirate Party announces the dawn of the “post-gender” age; the chairman of the Frankfurter Börse complains about “discrimination against men”; the journalist Birgit Kelle argues that quotas for women are a restriction of...