Saturday, March 13, 2021

Bad history and worse social science have replaced truth”

 Australian security agencies will give universities an expanded list of emerging technologies that should be protected from foreign interference as concern grows about local academics giving China access to their critical research.

The list will go beyond the military or “dual-use” technologies that Australian universities have traditionally been told to protect from foreign governments.

ASIO boss says foreign governments using deceptive means to obtain Australian research



The Sports World Is Run by Crooks. It’s Time To Change the Rules of the Game. Jacobin


All of them were clever, precocious, and poised on the threshold of a life that held great things. Of the cohort, two became members of Parliament, one of those the Attorney-General.




Articles of Note

Daryl Michael Scott, critic of the 1619 project and Ava DuVernay’s film 13th: “Bad history and worse social science have replaced truth”   ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Liberal and center-left political parties — once the champions of the working class — have become the home of the meritocrats, and hence the party of the new aristocracy... more »


March 10, 2021

Articles of Note

The paradox of Orientalism: While Edward Said's book castigated imperialism, it also weakened the anti-imperialist intellectual project... more »


New Books

Humanists should be skeptical of our increasingly analytical world. Unfortunately, Lev Manovich’s new book is full of gee-whiz-ism   ... more »


Essays & Opinions

When Robert Lowell left Elizabeth Hardwick for Caroline Blackwood and England, Hardwick decried his infidelity — both to her and to American literature   ... more »


March 9, 2021

Articles of Note

The idea that people on their deathbeds gain a clearer view of what matters has a distinguished philosophical pedigree. That doesn't mean it's true  ... more »


New Books

A sense of so-called “decency” long kept women out of art studios. Indeed, the history of art is "the history of many women not receiving their dues”  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Remember the televangelists? We now have the Instavangelists, hawking a blend of self-care, wellness, astrology, and left-wing politics  ... more »


March 8, 2021

Articles of Note

Carl Hart has used heroin regularly for years. “I am an unapologetic drug user,” says the Columbia University psychology professor  ... more »


New Books

Robin Dunbar’s science of friendship: Human beings can sustain at most 150 acquaintances, of which only five are intimate  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Lolita’s greatest champion? Véra Nabokov. She saved it from fire and thought to publish it abroad, decrying domestic “strait-laced morality”  ... more »


March 6, 2021

Articles of Note

Paul Valéry hobnobbed with princesses, ministers, and scientists. By the 1930s, he was France’s poetic stuffed shirt extraordinaire ... more »


New Books

The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »


Essays & Opinions

The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned   ... more »


March 5, 2021

Articles of Note

Originalism’s original sin. The judicial philosophy is best understood not in a legal context, but as an extension of biblical literalism  ... more »


New Books

High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality”  ... more »


March 4, 2021

Articles of Note

Two of the largest U.S. publishers want to merge. How many imprints will fold? How many jobs will be lost? ... more »


New Books

Soviet shame culture. The party constantly invented new mistakes. One could never be free from the risk of humiliation — or worse ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province  ... more »


March 3, 2021

Articles of Note

Jordan Petersen is rich, famous, and unhappy. His anxiety landed him in a Russian hospital. Now he's back from breakdown  ... more »


New Books

How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner... more »


Essays & Opinions

We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »