The End of the Beginning by Douglas Penick

This essay marks the ending of the lavish storehouse of riches known as Berfrois...
Read MoreAfter Literacy

The idea that each of us has a singular voice, and that it places a stamp of authorship on our compositions, is of course corollary to the prohibition on plagiarism...
Read MoreThe serious amateur hopes for something more…

Many people who engage in some pursuit avidly yet non-professionally might not share Adorno’s condescending attitude towards hobbies...
Read MoreTorments of Unclarity

Why did Husserl begin thinking about movement? What was it that inspired him to make what one might call “the movement turn”?
Read MoreGod, Justice, Love, Beauty: Remembering Jean-Luc Nancy

For Nancy, democracy is not a given form of government, with a fixed meaning, but a term whose meaning is in contestation...
Read MoreA Spinozan Reading by Simon Calder

Seventeenth-century Christian churches might have been better fortified against the challenges of modernity if they had embraced Spinozism...
Read MoreOwen Flanagan thinks that metaphysics must be continuous with our best science…

This conception of meaning-seeking motivates his modern adaptation of Buddhism, his pluralistic ethics, and his cross-cultural approach...
Read MoreWhat’s Eating

All life seems to be like wine, in that one always wants more; but unlike wine, in that one cannot quit it. Writing in particular seems to be a lot like wine. It’s good, it’s bad...
Read MoreThe State of Human History

Anthropology is fundamentally an anarchist project, as it zeroes in on levels of social reality where the state, even when it exists, is not the most salient factor in accounting for why human beings do what they do...
Read MoreOur Purpose Is Preservation

Twenty years ago a prophetic Onion article reported that the Dinty Moore soup company took a firm stand against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. Today this is no longer satire...
Read MoreBerlin and the Volcanoes of Theory by Stuart Walton

The principal shift in the transition from German to French theory is the abandonment of any ethical duty to the biggest picture of all, that of society...
Read MoreThe Perpetual Hygiene Regime and the STEMification of the Intellectuals

It is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name...
Read MoreJai Chakrabarti on Janusz Korczak

Korczak lived an extraordinary life through the worst of times. He was an educator and ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto...
Read MoreHannes Schumacher: Now, Apocalypse

To say that the apocalypse is both utopian and dystopian is neither left nor right but baldly realist; it is to prolong the ultimate decision into all eternity...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read More