Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Google has removed Gab‘s Android application from the Google Play store. This was done “as a policy strike because it [the app] violates the hate speech policy.” Google Play’s hate speech policy is this: We don’t allow apps that advocate…
This article is not as silly as it may sound. A few suggestions for better credibility: Don’t mix propaganda and anthropology. Forget The Female Body under Socialism and focus on the field studies. Take down that Soviet poster and the hammer…
This 1989 painting (the one on the left, Falling Stones I) by Nikolai Vechtomov (1923-2007) resembles an older work of his, from the 1960s, shown at the Thaw exhibition that ended in Moscow yesterday. Unfortunately, I cannot find the earlier work online,…
In some ways, this is creepier than all the Putinist propaganda. The lady is advertising her services as a goodthink coach for teenagers. Her lengthy ad, posing as a New York Times piece, begins with a reminder: Earlier this week,…
From the website of the Hermitage museum, St. Petersburg: In 2016, Anselm Kiefer, inspired by his visit to St. Petersburg, created a new exhibition project specially for the Hermitage Museum. It is in the triadic space of the colossal Nikolaevsky…
Christian Lorentzen, a columnist for New York Magazine and a former (?) editor-at-large with the LRB, has published an amusing essay subtitled “A brief history of sex in American fiction.” Amusing, that is, when read for low-level textual entertainment, not for meaning. Let me…
Anne Applebaum wrote in her Washington Post column, right up in its title: There is no one right way to react to terror. There is a wrong way. I’m not sure who died and bequeathed the arbiter morum job to Anne Applebaum,…
Via Crooked Timber, this corpuscle of pure delight at Bleeding Heart Libertarians: This journal doesn’t even hit the top 115 journals in Gender Studies. Here’s the list of the 115 top Gender Studies journals in the world referred to above. Granted, some of the…
An interesting discussion at Crooked Timber of the mutual loathing between the self-serving experts and the havoc-wreaking masses. Some quotes from the opening post and the comment thread: But that unwillingness to believe the experts, even when they’re right, isn’t based…
Ada Palmer, who teaches history at Chicago, writes science fiction and composes music, reminisces on her early encounter with Thomas Carlyle’s prose: My cohort and I were wolfing down a book a day in those months, looting each for thesis and argument, so…
In Prospect Magazine, Kevin Jackson writes that Stanley Kubrick’s “slick and meretricious film” was an “ambiguous triumph” for Anthony Burgess… …since he regarded the book, most of which he had dashed off in three weeks, as a squib. It’s not…
The country with the largest Muslim population in the world is Indonesia, followed by Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. These four account for more than 40% of the total. Nigeria is in the fifth place. Egypt, Iran and Turkey share places…