A history of France, newly available in English, has shocked some readers by what it omits, as much as what it includes. Patrick Boucheron, a French specialist of medieval Italian history, organized t
When one sets out to interview the author of a 700-page book on economics (being published by a university press), it is generally smooth sailing. Publishers and writers crave the publicity; copies of
According to the official film criticism, Pedro Almodóvar makes salaciously romantic and unabashedly emotional movies, with an acknowledgement of the irrational potency of romantic kitsch. As Charles
The French novelist Mathias Énard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isn’t a small town or neighborhood but the vast Mediterranean basin, and practically everyone within it. Énard sp
Troubling echoes in adherence to Hollywood vision of the past. [ comment ] Everybody has heard about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the recent Walt Disney blockbuster featuring Jake Gyllenhaal i
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The Conformity of Perversion Kirsten Hyldgaard It is a common idea that a perverse practice undermines laws, conventional norms, and morals, that the perverse subject is some sort of avant-garde again
Some Remarks on Isaiah Berlin Some Remarks on Isaiah Berlin Rafael Khachaturian: On Isaiah Berlin ▪ August 12, 2010 Last year’s centennial of Isaiah Berlin’s birth saw yet another revival of in
One of my fondest memories of growing up in Iran is having tea with my great grandmother in Shemiran . She presided over a long rectangular room in north Tehran seated on her prayer mat facing my gran
In September 2019, deputy Italian Prime Minister Matteo Salvini left office. An infamously hardline economic and social conservative, Salvini’s bread-and-butter issue has always been immigration—speci
For five years, a group of nationalist guerrilla fighters and communists had roamed the forests of Gilan, an Iranian province curving around the southwestern shore of the Caspian Sea. On June 4, 1920,
The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. If you’re an American adult who regularly rides a bicycle, you might feel a tiny sense of moral superiority about getting exercise and r
Essay Among the Disrupted Credit... Joon Mo Kang Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and recor
As Europe’s asylum crisis intensified last month, prominent liberal opinion pages — the London Review of Books , Le Monde , Canada’s Globe and Mail — featured contributions from some of today’s leadin
Norway is a small country. It is also relatively homogeneous and egalitarian. This means that the distance from top to bottom is short, and that great disasters affect the entire populace. For example
Clues concerning Machiavelli’s thinking as to his own immediate personal path lie in one of the Italian Renaissance’s most beautiful—and in some ways most deceiving—letters, which he wrote to his frie
Thirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalism—the embrace of an inclusive, diverse society—as an answer to Europe’s social problems. Today, a growing number consider it to be a cause of them.
Like many of us, Eric Jarosinski first started tweeting as a way of avoiding work. It was January of 2012, and Jarosinski, an assistant professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, was strug
Image by Beowulf Sheehan It is common now to hope that better days are ahead while also feeling that the end is, indeed, nigh; rampant income equality, police brutality, and climate change all seem to
Photograph by Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Not long ago, I unearthed a notebook I had long ago misplaced: a small blue ledger in which, for a period of about four years, I recorded the title of each book
by Guest Contributor Jehanzeb Dar, originally published at Broken Mystic When Frank Miller’s “300″ film was released, I was absolutely outraged by the racist content of the film and more so at the insensitivity of movie-goers who simply argued “it’s just a movie.” Later on, I would hear these same…
The surfers were good. They had smooth, ungimmicky styles. Nobody fell off. And nobody, blessedly, seemed to notice me. Photographs by William R. Finnegan / Courtesy the Author The budget for moving o
W e live in a time of exile. At least those of us do who hold to traditional Christian beliefs. The strident rhetoric of scientism has made belief in the supernatural look ridiculous. The Pill, no-fau
I returned on Sunday from Logos 2011 , a superb three-day conference at the University of Notre Dame, sponsored by the Center for Philosophy of Religion and under the specific auspices of the Analytic
A n article on campus sexual mores by Rod Dreher this week drove me to reflect on who is the most influential thinker of our present age. Thirty years ago as an undergraduate in England, I would have
Introduction Young Democratic Socialists of America is the youth and student section of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a national organization of recognized campus chapters and several hundred activists. We are students organizing in our universities, colleges, and high schools to fight…
The Islamic Republic creamed the Great Satan, 3-0, in both matches. Photograph by Amin Mohammad Jamali/Getty Iran and the United States did battle this weekend, as twelve thousand spectators packed Te
Essay Among the Disrupted Credit... Joon Mo Kang Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and recor
Illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo In 2012, 25-year-old James Holmes opened fire during a screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises . Twelve people were killed, and dozens more were injured. In t
Controversial author and new atheist Sam Harris recently tried to "engineer a public conversation" with radical linguist Noam Chomsky "about the ethics of war, terrorism, state surveillance, and relat
The disappearance of God is often considered elegiacally, as a loss. But secularism can also be an affirmation of the here and now. Illustration by BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN I have a friend, an analytic philo
“Have you read The Goldfinch yet?” Consider it the cocktail-party conversation starter of 2014, the new “Are you watching Breaking Bad ?” Eleven years in the making, 784 pages long, the book has re-ig
As my Twitter followers may know, I have been experimenting with a complete new context setup in OmniFocus in the last two to three weeks. Since I am pretty pleased with the result of this fresh appro
I didn’t recognize his name at first. It was his writing that caught my attention. An autobiography in 100 words. That was the first assignment, and it was as much for me to get to know my students as