Ephemera

René Burri/Magnum Photos Train arriving to Paris from Switzerland near Gare de lEst, 1950 When I met Tony Judt twenty years ago, he was on his way to catch a train. But he lingered instead in Providence to lunch with a couple of Brown University undergraduates. He gently gave ca...

It’s not that I’m totally startled to find this as the manner in which that great Anglo-Indian, Rudyard Kipling represents himself on the title page of the 1922 printing of Kim: But there is still a certain interesting shock in coming across it. In one sense, as we know, the swastika took on a...

I have mentioned The Brick Testament many times before, but a student just recently pointed out to me a blog I wasnt familiar with, GodBricks, which has a similar theme, being dedicated to all things at the intersection of religion and LEGOs.It includes Biblical items and episodes from Christian hi...

When I read Milbank’s recent essay on Islam, I planned to write a retort, but was quickly beaten to the punch by Adam.  In the following days, others have responded in like (courtesy of Roland Boer who, as you might expect, seems to agree with these responses). Though a full length response seems...

Peter follows up my last Leibniz post with a different question. I was talking about how Descartes came just before Leibniz, and how Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Pufendorf, Newton were his contemporaries. Peter asks Here’s a perhaps naive question, but isn’t it generally the case that there are real...

Corey McCall in Other Voices: Readers of Foucault’s texts have long been perplexed by the apparent shift his writings underwent in the late 1970s. Following the appearance of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Le volunté de savoir, translated as The History of Sexuality: An Introduc...

Anyone who’s been reading this blog recently knows that I’ve been working on Leibniz, and little else, for the past few weeks. I can’t stress enough the difficulties I’m encountering in this work.  Part of the problem is that – as with (just about) everything I reference in this book –...

Please, if you haven’t already, read Albert Einstein’s brilliant defense of socialism, published in the first issue of Monthly Review back in 1949. I’m tempted to simply repost the whole thing, but I’ll restrict myself to a synopsis of the key points. Einstein first rejects the claims to sc...

Peter Struck in Lapham's Quarterly: Last fall, Forbes magazine was all atwitter as Tiger Woods closed in on becoming “the first athlete to earn over $1 billion” in the course of his career. Presumably his fortunes will now start to droop, but Forbes missed the mark—taking the long view, Tige...