David Brooks says liberals need to get philosophy in his op-ed today. I’m sure folks will be weighing in on the matter, both critiquing and agreeing with his point. In any case, The American Prospect’s Michael Tomasky already wrote Brooks’ column over a month ago:
I’ve long had the sense, and it’s only grown since […]
Miguel Sanchez has an entertaining couple of posts up at Modern Kicks on an MIT conference called "Regarding Evil" and laments the excesses of High Theory:
Far more bothersome is the sense one gets from the materials that at least some of those involved find the topic of evil to be just another topos to be […]
I came across this paragraph in James Patterson’s Grand Expectations (p.62).
The murder rate had halved by 1945. As became clear later, this situation was abnormal, stemming in part from the fact that the United States had a relatively small cohort of young men - those most prone to crime - at the time. This in […]
I think the awful weather has led me to pull out those 70s punk albums sitting idle. Which in turn has led me to dust off my copy of Griel Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. I find it an odd read, simply because Marcus certainly has a feel for punk and can explicate a Sex Pistols song […]
Posting will be sparse the next couple of weeks as I try to power through this dissertation chapter. For those wondering what it is exactly I’m writing on, the diss is an analytical history of Hollywood’s social problem films from the 1940s and 50s… Gentleman’s Agreement, The Men, The Snake Pit, Defiant Ones, etc. This […]
I thought the nadir of Lee Smith’s contributions at Slate was his article on multilateralism that thoroughly confused the Iraq war with interventions in international terrorism and seemed unaware that many critics had different stances on the need for multilateralism depending on which issue you’re talking about.
Only today, he attacks the academy for impeding […]
This is being picked up extensively elsewhere, but the IgNobel Award winner list is pretty hilarious. Chris Brooke takes a look at the winner for Medicine (”The Effect of Country Music on Suicide”) and surveys the social scientific literature on the depressive effects of country music. Talk about Media Effects research gone wrong. Yikes. At […]
or, “Blame Poststurcturalists, part II”….
Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram has a good takedown of an Oliver Kamm post taking Michel Foucault’s professed admiration of the anarchic spirit of the Iranian Revolution as some evidence of the Left’s affinity with Islamo-fascism. As Bertram notes, the connection is preposterous:
Presumably Ketland’s mention of Foucault’s PCF [Communist Party] membership is […]
Brad DeLong asks, perhaps rhetorically:
So can someone please come up with a short list–five one-sentence bullet points, for example–of the fundamental insights of Marxism considered as an intellectual enterprise?
Since this site used to be “Marxists for Keynes” — and since my own dissertation takes up the Marxist rubric in parts — I guess I […]
Kieran at Crooked Timber sees Paul Krugman speak at the American Sociological Association and comes away with these thoughts:
The worst [question], stupid as well as rude, asked whether economics was “too mired in the muck of right-wing thought” to do any good in the world….Questions like that are the bobblehead left-wing analogue to the pez-dispenser […]
It was only a matter of time before enterprising souls would apply public relations techniques to blogging. This arrived in my mailbox recently.
Greetings,
My name is Leighanne cole and I found your Blog and I am currently working on a massive Get Out the Vote effort to help reclaim the White House and Congress. We […]
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an essay wondering what happened to academic style. Yes, it could be a tired complaint, except for the fact that contemporary academic writing in the humanities (outside history) may be well-written for some purposes but won’t surprise anyone with its grace. Furthermore, the author Ben Yagoda actually examines the […]
Perhaps nothing is so overdue as an intellectual correction to the excesses of critical theory’s hegemony in the humanities disciplines of the Anglo-American academy, with emphasis on American and literary studies. However, so many of the attacks - whether from the popular press or from non-humanities disciplines - are unsatisfactory screeds that puff up straw […]
One of the most frustrating classes I took my freshman year in college was a Philosophy in Film course. Part of the problem was that I wasn’t really prepared not having had any philosophy training - I’m still not really very knowledgeable in the subject. But part of it was that as a new college […]
Both the New York Times and the Guardian are carrying word that David Reimer has died this week, having killed himself last Tuesday. If news has taken a while to reach the obit page - and if you’re wondering just who David Reimer is - it’s because he’s more famous under another name. Writes the […]