Recent

Chronicling the Non-Event: Anton Chekhov and the Short Story

Chekhov is engaging with an underlying, rumbling, non-event that pervades life and yet is nearly always blithely ignored. His stories move us in their ability to excavate this subterranean, haunting static that informs all experience.

Books

The Dialectic of the Freak: On John Waters' 'Female Trouble'

In John Waters' work, poor taste is a manner of refinement that attains a strange air of considered sophistication and knowing advertency.

Film

'The Anguish of Thought': A Logical Line of Analysis for a Study of Madness

Regarding Evelyne Grossman's The Anguish of Thought, Ph.D. candidates across America should just lay down their pencils now before they embarrass themselves.

Books

Action at a Distance: The Father in Víktor Erice's El Sur

The Father is the wielder of profuse potency but it can only be maintained through distance and the renunciation of understanding, the willingness to embrace the mystery without examining it. But, necessarily, the child must penetrate that veil.

Film

The End of Endings; or, Why Won't Anyone Stay Dead?

What does it mean, ontologically and narratively, when the seeming finality of death disappears from our stories? What does it mean when our stories and our characters, unlike our lives, refuse to come to an end?

Comics

An Appeal for Balance: 'Action Versus Contemplation'

Billions grapple with a frenetic paradigm shift which scuffs lines between a carefree ant's and a diligent grasshopper's domains.

Books

'Jimi Hendrix and Philosophy' Is a Mixed Bag, Man

Jumping into the fire, howling wind, and bombs bursting in air with the uber rock god.

Books

On Nabokov's Experiments with Fragmented Dream Time

Nabokov's work is a fascinating read for all the questions it raises—some of which the world's best minds have been tackling for centuries.

Books

Propoganda Isn't About Trying to Fool You

Lee McIntyre's 'Post-Truth' is a history lesson and a call to action asking liberals to defend the concept of objective truth. But is it the best approach to the problem?

Reviews

Time to Think: Carlo Rovelli on the Mysteries of Time

The Order of Time is a little wonder of a book. It provides surprising insights into an increasingly mysterious world, offers warmly humane reflections on our existential condition, and sustains a virtual conversation that will continue long after the reading has ceased.

Books

Alea iacta est!: Plutarch and the Event of the Self

For Plutarch, life and the course of history insist that we face up to who we are and this is as harrowing as it is liberating; it is the source of our destruction as much as it is the springboard for our accomplishments.

Books

Game of Throne's Daenerys Targaryen Is Niccolò Machiavelli's Perfect Princ[ess]

If Niccolò Machiavelli were alive today he would enjoy the politically-charged and fantastical world of Game of Thrones, particularly the moral struggles of Daenerys Targaryen.

Television

'Looking for The Stranger': Sometimes the Truth Is as Strange as the Fiction

Aspiring writers with ambition to shape the philosophies of the future can benefit from Camus as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.

Books

Certainty Interrupted: 'Exact Thinking In Demented Times'

As a history of ideas, this work is especially good at mapping the Vienna Circle's fascinating afterlife in the English-speaking countries where many prominent thinkers landed and flourished in the 20th century.

Features

Pause and Effect: How to Stop Jumping to Conclusions

A sociologist offers hope for finding better solutions to complex problems by asking better questions about causation.

Books

Is Life in a 'Post-Truth' World Sustainable?

How do we overcome the human tendency to resist verifiable reality? Lee McIntyre takes this on in this installment of MIT's Essential Knowledge series.

Books

Pop Ten

The 25 Best Electronic Albums of 2018

The Best Jazz of 2018

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The Best Indie Pop of 2018

The 20 Best Folk Albums of 2018

Jackie Chan's 10 Best Films

The Best Progressive Rock/Metal of 2018

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