What does it mean to live in an age of thinking machines? The question may seem like a unique product of our digital world, but it has deep roots in ancient literature. It is implicit as early as ...
Tag: Philosophy
The Trouble with “Modernity”
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that capitalism is the engine behind the environmental crises of the early 21st century. It doesn’t even take a Marxist: as the French environmental journalist ...
Rediscovering Classics: The Essays of Tosaka Jun
Editor’s Note: What follows is the beginning of a new series, “Rediscovering Classics,” that features overlooked or forgotten works of thought and literature that remain relevant and powerful today ...
Soft Atheism
It’s not easy being new. It doesn’t last long. Sometimes it isn’t even an apt characterization in the first place. Take “New Atheism,” the label applied to a body of writings by such figures as ...
Of Clouds and Clocks: The Fiction of David Mitchell
All fiction plays with the tension between freedom and necessity—that is part of what it means to be fiction—but David Mitchell’s fiction plays with it more ostentatiously than most. To what degree ...
Global Warming and Network Think
On August 26th, 2014, in the lead-up to the United Nations summit scheduled for the following month, the New York Times carried a story on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest draft ...
Alternative Economies of Art and Politics: An Interview with Gabriel Rockhill and Nato Thompson
Writing about art and politics often falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, there are those who espouse “art for art’s sake,” arguing that art is a restricted and autonomous domain, concerned ...
International Forum on the Novel: Keywords
Every year, the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France, invites authors to speak on a “keyword” of their choice. The following videos and accompanying text are drawn from this year’s forum ...
The Mixed-Up Kids of Mrs. E. L. Konigsburg
Imagine that you are a children’s book editor. An unproven writer who has only recently sold her first story sends you her second effort. The manuscript opens with a rich old lady’s note to her ...
Translating the Untranslatable: An Interview with Barbara Cassin
Barbara Cassin is a French philosopher, translator, and theorist of translation. Trained as a philologist and philosopher specializing in ancient Greece, she is the director of research at the Centre ...
Rancière’s Counter-Modernism
The question “What is art?” belongs in the ranks of the great koans of Western philosophy, as intolerable and unavoidable as “What is being?” and “What is the good life?” Immanuel Kant, perhaps ...
Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them. I say this after having read widely across the rapidly accumulating literature in defense ...
Hari Kunzru on Networks, the Novel, and the Politics of the Author
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer who lives and works in New York. He is the author of four novels as well as numerous articles in publications including Wired, the New Yorker, the Washington ...
Attacking Love
Valentine’s Day evokes thoughts of love … and perhaps disgust. Revulsion arises in response to commercialization and the pressure to express meaningful attachment. But the disgust may also stem from ...
