Travelling for a story in Mongolia when five months pregnant, journalist Ariel Levy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Levy_(journalist)) gave birth to her son alone on the floor of her hotel room, shortly after which, he died. This traumatic tragedy damaged the writer in ways which are described in ‘The Rules Do Not Apply’. This memoir is a fast paced account […]
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Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Goldstein (http://www.amygoldsteinwriter.com/) spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin where America’s oldest operating General Motors plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession, two days before Christmas of 2008. With intelligence, sympathy, and insight Goldstein describes what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval. Her reporting takes
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Jane Austen’s novels have never gone out of fashion, nor received anything less than high critical acclaim. Her work is familiar to millions who have never read a word by means of costume drama on film and television. Through three intertwined histories Jane Austen’s Textual Lives offers a new way of approaching and reading this most familiar
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In the Philosophical Investigations (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve), Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that philosophical perplexities “arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” When we are engaged in everyday practicalities and challenges there seems no point in metaphysics. If that suffices, turn the page. If you have fallen prey to some of these speculations it’s
The Mystery of Existence edited by Robert Lawrence Kuhn Read More »
Joan Silber (http://joansilber.net/?page_id=18) is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of Household Words (Penguin Books, 1981), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award, and Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (W.W. Norton, 2004), which was a finalist for both the 2004 National Book Award and the Story Prize. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital. A boy named David sits beside her. She is not his mother. He’s not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story
In southern California, over 50 years ago, a small band of researchers were pursuing a not inconsequential goal – to uncover the origin and fate of the universe. They were equipped with the new 200-inch telescope. Their quest would eventually engulf all of physics and astronomy, leading not only to the discovery of quasars, black
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It has been understood at least since Wittgenstein (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/) that there are varieties of human thought and discourse, and that they intersect in interesting ways. They have been described as ‘language games’. Each game in a school playground has its own set of rules. These are absorbed and complied with by the participants for the
The Rhetoric of Religion by Kenneth Burke Read More »
In 2013 Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick were convicted of 86 arsons in Accomack County, Virginia. Reporter Monica Hesse (https://www.monicahesse.com/) tells the story of their motivations and communities living through fear, confusion and danger. Hesse spends a chapter comparing Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick to Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Tonya was a showoff with something
American Fire by Monica Hesse Read More »
The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism presents an edited collection of essays that explore the nature of humanism (https://humanism.org.uk/humanism/) as an approach to life, and a philosophical analysis of the key humanist propositions from naturalism and science to morality and meaning. It looks at humanism not just in terms of its theoretical underpinnings, but also
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Ideas about the gene, genetics and genetic engineering get splashed around in the media routinely now. Often the gene is cast up as a simple determinant of behaviour, such as a ‘criminal gene’, or a ‘homosexual gene’. Not many subjects have occasioned as much confusion and misunderstanding. A clear, accurate, and up-to-date popular science
Flim-Flam! explains that not one shard of evidence exists to prove that the Bermuda Triangle poses any special menace to ships and planes, that earth is being visited by alien spacecraft, that the unassisted power of mind can read closed books, predict our future or induce levitation. It shows that the ‘psychic surgeons’ of the Philippines have relieved their
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Elif Batuman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman) is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Her 2017 novel The Idiot concerns a college undergraduate, Selin, attending Harvard. The title is a conscious echo of the novel by Dostoyevski. Selin has a conversation with her university friend Svetlana about whether or not one’s life should be thought of
Here is something to unsettle your conviction that there is any real ‘self’ reading these words. V.S. Ramachandran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran) shows how strikingly simple experiments can illuminate the ways the brain establishes the illusion of a self. In avuncular style, he snatches territory from philosophers on the certainty of knowledge. In one experiment, stroking an amputee’s cheek produces sensations
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Transport yourself to a place somewhat hotter and drier than Clydesdale in March 2018. The Sheltering Desert is about two young German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, who seek refuge in the Namib Desert and live a bushman existence for two and a half years. Martin and Korn had left Nazi Germany for Namibia to conduct field
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