Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
James Panero of The New Criterion has produced a puzzling review of “the traveling exhibition, ‘Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect’.” Wyeth manipulated his compositions much like a silent film director… In his lack of authenticity and his chilly sentiment, Wyeth was…
Corey Robin, the author of The Reactionary Mind, wrote on Crooked Timber: Schumpeter famously said that taxes are the “thunder of world history.” In The Guardian, he put it this way: Taxes are the “thunder of world history,” wrote Joseph…
Last week, Ben Judah wrote in The American Interest: Why is it always Orwell o’clock? Why is everything mildly unpleasant about government instantly Orwellian? Why is every banal propaganda effort obviously 1984 sprung to life?.. Most of the Orwell cult…
Google Tariq Ramadan Martin Luther, and you’ll have a dozen headlines comparing the prédicateur to the Prediger – tentatively yet hopefully. Assuming the impossible, suppose it were a near-perfect parallel. Would it logically require an upheaval in the Arab world…
My thoughts keep coming back to the story of the postmistress from the Sedlčany district as told by Švejk in Jaroslav Hašek’s novel. You can find it near the end of Part III, “A Glorious Spanking.” I’m relying on Cecil Parrott’s…
In Chapter 4 of Misbehaving, Richard Thaler writes: Here is a test to see if you are a good intuitive Pythagorean thinker. I mentioned this test in my previous post. Here’s Thaler’s formulation of it, abridged by me: Consider two…
…but what is rationality? What is rational behavior? In a word, maximizing: choosing the preferable consumption bundle given the budget constraints and certain other factors. One word is not enough, it seems. I should link to the principal sources of…
In 2013, “W.W.” wrote in the Democracy in America column in The Economist: The insidiousness of “libertarian paternalism” is not in the slippery slope from the non-coercive nudge to explicitly coercive limits on individual liberty. Rather, the problem is that,…
Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction gets reviewed in literary journals, awarded literary prizes and included in Top 100 Best Novels lists. It means that – after Alexievich (documentary non-fiction) and Dylan (song lyrics) – we’re back to the world of novels and…
In a review of Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Lee Rourke quoted the opening lines of the French author’s 2001 novel Platform: Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become…
Paul Mason, the left-wing British journalist, has an excellent piece in The Guardian: “There is no place in academia for craven submission to Chinese censorship demands.” I have three comments to make – here, because I’m late for the comments…
Going back to Kirsten Ghodsee’s New York Times article, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. It was probably a Times editor who came up with the title. As I’ve tried to explain, it’s a complicated subject that cannot be summed…