Nietzsche: a genealogist of morality … Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images T hroughout his life Nietzsche thought of himself as an educator, but the time he spent working in higher education was not long and much of it he found frustrating. Appointed professor in classical philology at the…

Why does misinformation spread so quickly on the social media? Why doesn’t it get corrected? When the truth is so easy to find, why do people accept falsehoods? A new study focusing on Facebook users provides strong evidence that the explanation is confirmation bias: people’s tendency to seek out…

Illustration: Peter Gamlen D r David Pollens is a psychoanalyst who sees his patients in a modest ground-floor office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a neighbourhood probably only rivalled by the Upper West Side for the highest concentration of therapists anywhere on the planet. Pollens, who is…

Buy The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark Allen Lane, 697 pp, £30.00, September 2013, ISBN 978 0 7139 9942 6 Fifty years ago, Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August taught a generation of Americans about the origins of the First World War: the war, she wrote,…

I lost my driver’s license over a year ago. I lose stuff all the time. Credit cards, passports, car keys, cash, books, bags, laptops. It doesn’t worry me, they usually turn up eventually. The last time I was in New York, I left my backpack in a taxi. I had taken three of my kids with me, so I was a…

Buy The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone Bantam, 384 pp, £18.99, October 2013, ISBN 978 0 593 07047 5 Jeff Bezos thinks of himself as a great man, and why shouldn’t he? ‘Our vision is to have every book ever printed, in any language, available in under 60 seconds.’ He…

A strange thing has happened since the release of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”: people are talking about George Lucas with something other than contempt. Credit Photograph by Nicky Loh / Bloomberg via Getty For fanboys everywhere “The Force Awakens” was supposed to have one happy side effect: it…

In the opening of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel “The Marriage Plot,” an English professor complains that contemporary life has been disastrous for the novel. His argument goes like this: “In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a…

From China in Asia to Russia in Europe and the Middle East, and ISIS just about everywhere, 2015 has seen the flourishing of conflicts that exist in a gray zone, one which is not quite open war but more than regular competition, which is attuned to globalization, which liberal democracies are…

A ship lands on an alien shore and a young man, desperate to prove himself, is tasked with befriending the inhabitants and extracting their secrets. Enchanted by their way of life, he falls in love with a local girl and starts to distrust his masters. Discovering their man has gone native, they in…

It is not as if the rich are a little more equal.Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer T he economic hoarding by those at the top has been termed “income inequality”, but that’s neither a strong nor accurate enough phrasing. I have never heard poor people complain about “income inequality”; poor…

Shôchiku Eiga/New Yorker Films Setsuko Hara as Noriko Somiya in Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring , 1949 We’re always hearing about the ends of eras, but the recent death of the great actress Setsuko Hara really is the end of an era—the era of the classic Japanese film, of the directors Mizoguchi, Ozu,…

http://chronicle.com/article/Lived-Philosophy/234426?utm_content=buffer389ee&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Richard Radford via Getty Images MOSCOW -- The Public Opinion Foundation conducted a survey this month asking Russians two questions: "What was the main event of the year in Russia?" and "What was the main global event of the year?" Noteworthy is that fully 40 percent of the respondents had trouble…

http://gu.com/p/4dxaa?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Add_to_Instapaper

An Appetite for Wonder: The Makings of a Scientist by Richard Dawkins (Ecco Press) If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins…

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/politics-behind-original-star-wars

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” directed by J. J. Abrams, feels young, and as an act of pure storytelling it streams by with fluency and zip. Credit Photograph by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Lucasfilm Ltd. / Courtesy Everett O.K., spoilers first. The Millennium Falcon is back, although one…

Adam McKay, known for directing the comedy blockbuster "Anchorman," stops by the WSJ Cafe to talk about taking on the 2007 financial crisis in his new film "The Big Short," which co-stars Brad Pitt, Steve Carell, Christian Bale, and Ryan Gosling. Photo: Paramount Pictures The global financial crisis…

Foto: Krišjānis Lācis Viena no filozofijas iezīmēm ir tās nenovēršamā vērstība pašai uz sevi, ko pauž nebeidzami meklējumi pēc atbildes uz jautājumu „kas ir filozofija?”. Izprovocējot uz šādiem meklējumiem Latvijas Universitātes asociēto profesoru Raivi Bičevski, mēs ar Krišjāni Lāci centāmies…

Todd Haynes’s themes of sexual outsiders and repressive social mores have seen him associated with the New Queer Cinema — a trend which redefines cultures of sexual transgression. His 2002 film Far From Heaven, a homage to the technicolour melodramas of Douglas Sirk, told of a white, middle class…

This fourth and final film in the Hunger Games series, adapted from Suzanne Collins’s young adult fiction trilogy, has been one of the most highly anticipated movies of the year. In the post-apocalyptic dystopia Panem 12 districts exist in varying states of poverty under the totalitarian power of…

Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases and exclamations, I always think, “How many novels disappear without a trace!” Disappear into darkness. We haven’t been able to capture the conversational side of human life…

Buy Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of a Democratic Europe by Pablo Iglesias , translated by Lorna Scott Fox Verso, 237 pp, £10.99, November 2015, ISBN 978 1 78478 335 8 ‘I have defeat tattooed in my DNA,’ Pablo Iglesias said in a debate on television last year, a month after…

Saruna ar aktieri Andri Keišu par reālo un nereālo Sergejs Timofejevs 17/12/2015 Visi runā, ka realitāte esot mainījusies. Politkorektuma laiki beigušies – tā nesen paziņoja vispopulārākais latviešu teātra režisors. Kaimiņvalsts politiķi bazūnē par jaunu pasaules kārtību. Tuvajos Austrumos pavisam…

Darth Vader after boarding Princess Leia’s ship in “Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope.” (Credit: Lucasfilm) The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng recently noted that “neoconservative Twitter” loves the Galactic Empire, the putative villains of the “Star Wars” universe, prompting much harrumphing from…

Photo: Everett Collection; Photo Illustration: Jaclyn Kessel With the imminent release of the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens , many theatergoers are re-watching the original movies to reacquaint themselves with those stories from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. This time, however,…

STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, Attack of the Clones. There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the…