Construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron. From What is Mathematics?, by H. Robbins, 1941. Illustration by R. Courant by Alessandro De Francesco in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through…
Read Moreby Gérard Bertrand The Old Castle The old castle often loomed in Kafka’s dreams. Kafka at the Hopper home Although he had been invited, Franz Kafka nonetheless had the disagreeable sensation of not being welcome at the Hopper home. Vassili K.’s workshop A frequent visitor of Vassili K.’s workshop, Franz Kafka, aged twenty-three at the…
Read Moreby Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised…
Read MoreTranslated by Brian Reed It was. It passed. It was, so it passed. In an always irreversible order, because that’s the rule in this loser’s game. A banal proposition, hardly worth writing, except it’s an incontrovertible fact, a fact forever and ever, throughout the cosmos, as it was and will be, that something truly was,…
Read MoreAnita Desai by James Warner In The Artist of Disappearance, Anita Desai meditates on the private and fragile nature of the creative act. Her nostalgic visions of India are also parables of the self’s search for authenticity. Anita Desai’s work has often shown us the remnants of a glorious past crumbling in the glare of…
Read MorePeoples Library, Zuccotti Park. Photograph by David Shankbone by Barbara Fister In 2011, American libraries fought for the right to do what they had done in the past: share books and information. Over the past ten years, scholarship has been massively privatized; library access to journals is now almost largely outsourced to corporations, and soon…
Read MoreMichaelangelo’s depiction of God by Massimo Pigliucci The other night I was with friends, enjoying a relaxing evening of Chinese takeout and a wine that was far too expensive to go with it, while we started watching favorite YouTube videos. One of them is ricky Gervais’ take on Noah’s Ark. If you haven’t seen it,…
Read MoreWolfgang Schäuble by Markha Valenta So why are we in Europe going down the path of a deeply self-deceptive and hypocritical race to the bottom, where trans-European solidarity is a non-starter, since it can only be a barrier to a European political elite now intent on pursuing the next phase of our liberalization by means…
Read Moreby 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 taking a different turn – even…
Read MoreWhile Putin restored effective bureacratic order to Russia, the rules were never meant for himself or his cronies. For this reason, many Russians believe he has become a block to the development of Russian statehood. Image (cc) premier.gov.ru by Vladimir Pastukhov Vladimir Putin’s one great achievement is the restoration of bureaucratic order after its near…
Read MoreRosetta, 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 and an encouraging degree of popular…
Read Moreby 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 Hume, for Husserl it was the…
Read MoreEric Rimmington by Laurie Penny In some ways it was the first place I ever knew. Seventeen, sick and living in a box-room belonging to an octogenarian friend of the family, every day once I was just about well enough not to have to sleep in hospital overnight I would wake up at five and…
Read MoreV. Covers. From L-R: first Italian edition (1965), first German edition (1968), first English paperback edition (1966), first Modern Library edition (1966) by Martin Paul Eve The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 212pp. The Cambridge Companion series has become, in academic literary…
Read MoreGoogle office, Zurich by Abe Walker Abstract This article takes as its central object of study Google’s innovative time off program, colloquially known as ‘20 Percent Time’. This program represents a radical departure from conventional approaches to organizing the workday, and is quickly gaining traction in the technology sector and beyond. Under the directive of…
Read Moreby Gregory Jusdanis “Imagine a world without art.” This could easily have been the message greeting visitors to the Wikipedia site on January 18, 2012, when it went silent in protest against legislation proposed in Congress (Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA). For Wikipedia and Google the issue is “free information” in the “open” internet.…
Read MorePersian indigo production methods by Emma Darwin Recently, I came upon a neat phrase to use on those people who refuse to hear the fact that there has been net emigration of central Europeans from Britain, because all the waiters in their local Pizza Express come from Warsaw: “Data is not the plural of anecdote.”…
Read MoreIllustration by DonkeyHotey by Charlotte Noble By now, I’m sure you’ve all heard the story. In October 2011, Florida’s Governor Rick Scott singled out of anthropology as a useless major, igniting a flurry of heated discussions about the utility of anthropology as well as other liberal arts majors. For those not privy to Gov. Scott’s…
Read MoreHamada Ben-Amor, aka “El Général by Ulysses In the midst of the Arab Spring there is a group of dedicated young hip hop artists who are using their medium to disseminate revolutionary ideas. This piece documents how hip hop has impacted on the way young people interact with the revolution in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Libya…
Read MoreBryan Cranston as Walter White, Breaking Bad, AMC by William Egginton In a recent NPR piece TV critic Eric Deggans cites shows like “Hell on Wheels,” Sons of Anarchy,” “Dexter,” and “Breaking Bad” as evidence of a proliferations of television programs featuring “characters the audience likes and wants to see succeed, even though they act…
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