If you are a Dem, liberal, progressive, or a conservative who thinks Trump is awful, Rick Wilson’s “Everything Trump Touches Dies” will reinforce and harden your views. It’s shock jock entertainment in written form. But other than a fan-fiction vignette with Ivanka and a weird homo-erotic fantasy involving Trump and Sean Hannity, there is nothing new here.
How Christopher Beha’s satire of celebrity culture creates space for the human in technology’s panopticon
Everyone has that favorite book they have played out as a movie in their imagination. Mine is Red Storm Rising. If done properly it would be not only an epic piece of storytelling, but timely as well.
Remembering and reading Philip Roth in 2018.
In which an economist looks at one of the seminal science fiction works of the 20th Century.
A language is more than a listing of its words.
Parting thoughts on the former next Madame President. (Or: I listened to 16 hours of Hillary Clinton so you don’t have to.)
Is “God” a necessary component to undergird universal human rights? And if so, what kind of God best serves the purpose and how compatible is the biblical God, and/or God of the various orthodox traditions with said purpose?
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Revisionism
David Clarke vs the Flying Saucers!
Forest Born of the Books of Bayern series by Shannon Hale
You’ll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn
Many scientists like to nitpick science fiction, but why should they have all the fun?
Murder: what if there were an app for that?
A scholarly look at how literature can help us to understand the hard work of being human.
Youtube is where intellectuals should be making community outreach.
A less-than-fair review
The beauty and power of the opening passage.
Two scholars do a service for intellectual history in arguing how a distinguished thinker could have been so misguided.
How to build a book collection for pennies on the dollar.
“Didn’t anyone get out?” Jim said.
“No. They seem to have been shot.”
The late Elie Wiesel spent his life telling stories — just not the kind he’s known for.
A book written for book reviewers
Confessions of a public scribbler
Old poetry is laden with the baggage of centuries of hidden metaphor and archaic references. New poetry is prone to abstraction and whimsical laziness. But poetry deserves our consideration as an art form nonetheless. After all, all the music we love is poetry, and all the fun little things we can do with language are best done in poetic form.
How we write stories mirrors the strange and uncanny ways we make sense of our lives.
Read about cutting edge research from Harvard that both contradicts a “secular” understanding of modernity and supports an egalitarian economic vision of such.
In her essays, the award-winning novelist examines the significance, past, present, and future, of America’s missing Religious Left.
Poems. (Not mine.)
The best biography written by a CEO is not a business biography.
This is the second in a series where I read and discuss a radical book on the left or right. This time, I address a book related to radical Black organizing in Detroit in the 60s and 70s.
Slavery, like the past, isn’t past. It ain’t even dead yet.
The problem with psychology, and the seductive fallacy of “studies have shown.”
The memoir of an East L.A. barrio girl turned punk rock legend.
Biologist Jerry Coyne has managed to write what might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre…
I’m super-interested in this book, just like Bill Clinton is and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson probably would have been.
