Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
Tag: Philosophy
Going Deep: Baseball and Philosophy
Among the iconic images that memorialize one of the greatest moments in baseball history—Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run to win the 1960 World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates—I have a special ...
The Critique of Racial Liberalism
This month I interviewed Charles W. Mills about his new book, Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Mills is Distinguished ...
Against Civility
Donald Trump and his global populist counterparts, such as Farage in England, Orbán in Hungary, or Duterte in the Philippines, gain popularity through rhetoric ...
The Book That Made Me: Learn How to Love
The Book That Made Me is a series about the books that have changed our lives. In this inaugural installment, a National Book Award–winning historian …
What Is It Like to Be an Elephant?
Why did Harambe become a meme? In a post-election landscape that demands we acknowledge Internet trolling as a practice with world-historical consequences ...
Losing Their Religion
Rarely do we pity the pious Victorian patriarch. Why should we sympathize with the privileged men who stoutly believed that God had placed them at the apex of a “Great Chain of Being”? One of the ...
God Walks Into a Bar
One of the stories in Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Franz Kafka triumphantly addressing a fish at a public aquarium. He has just become a vegetarian, and thus finally feels his ...
Being Data
In 1966, Der Spiegel interviewed Martin Heidegger: SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now? HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics.1 Even before the mass production of personal computers, Heidegger saw ...
“A Writer Should Never Get Over How Embarrassing This Is”: A Conversation With Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s debut novel, Inherited Disorders, makes its method visible to you as you read: you watch the book, feel it turning itself inside out in order to say something worth it. Its ...
Foucault and the Fictocritics
For at least three decades, starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault was a phenomenon nearly comparable to the Beatles, or his predecessor on the academic scene, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a history of ...
Trouble in Lovecraft Country
Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country drops into the world of science-fiction and horror publishing at an interesting time. The fandom around this culture is arcane and probably irremediably nerdy to ...
An Ancient Treatise and the Making of Modern India
In the intellectual history of modern India, 1909 was a turning point. That year Mohandas Gandhi, a middle-aged Gujarati lawyer based in South Africa, wrote his slim but Galilean freedom charter ...
To Laugh, So as Not to Weep: Paul Murray’s Modern Banking Satire
Paul Murray’s novel The Mark and the Void is set in the bleak landscape of 21st-century banking. It’s a story about the relationship between an idealistic banker named Claude and a jaded writer named ...
The Spinning Wheels of Pluralism
Throughout his poetry, recently published as the collection Sufi Lyrics, Bullhe Shah describes religious life as a spinning wheel. We are impelled to spin properly, but that can only take us so far ...
China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of ...
Stunt Double: Twice Fallen
The wounds of civil wars last. You can forgive a stranger, but family and neighbors, that’s another story. In America, the Confederate flag still raises old myths and divisions. In Algeria, the ...
A Global Neuromancer
Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has ...
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking
At Loyola University New Orleans I teach a seminar on David Foster Wallace—a class I designed at the urging of several students. One day late in the semester we were tackling Wallace’s very short ...
International Forum on the Novel 2015: Keywords
Each year, the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France, invites authors to write about a “keyword” of their choice. The following texts are drawn from this year’s forum, presented by the ...
