Muir’s introduction is worth reading for its own sake. His first sentence: “This book is intended to be not only an anthology raisonnéebut also a gesture of gratitude and commemoration.” Muir’s touch can be aphoristic or: “Wit is the aristocratic aspect of comedy.” And he defines what he’s after:
“The English sense of humour is an agreeable mixture of a sense of fun and a sense of proportion, which is not at all the same thing as a taste for buffoonery. Perhaps a small axiom could be proposed: beware of people who only laugh at jokes.”
Esquire’s Justin Kirkland with “TV’s Antihero Era Is Over. Welcome to the Golden Age of Hope.”
Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone. Character-driven Italian crime drama from Walter Presents.
A cranky and unorthodox detective is exiled to the snowbound Val D'Aosta where he is confronted with compelling cases. After the incident, Rocco is questioned by his bosses.
Weed smoking, foulmouthed Rocco Schiavone is an offbeat Deputy Commissioner of the State Police. For disciplinary reasons he is transferred to the Alpine town of Aosta, far from his beloved Rome. The sophisticated but cranky Roman despises the mountains, the cold, and the provincial locals as much as he disdains his superiors and their petty rules. But he loves solving crimes.
—Harry
After getting on the wrong side of the wrong people in Rome, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone (Antonio Manzini) is exiled to Aosta, a small, touristy alpine town far from the cobbled streets and fritto misto of his beloved city.
Rocco’s talent for solving crimes is matched only by his disdain for the rules and his eye for a beautiful woman. But when a mangled body is found on the ski slopes, he soon discovers that his Roman sophistication – not to mention his expensive Roman shoes – are of little help in this dangerous and unfamiliar mountain landscape. With blood on the black run, rumours of mafia involvement and a murderer at large, Deputy Police Chief Schiavone is about to find himself skating on very thin ice…
With a complicated past and working with some hilariously inept police underlings, Rocco uses his keen sense of detective intuition and solves various crimes. The nice thing about the series is that a crime is usually resolved in two episodes and then moves on to the next crime. This not only keeps the viewer’s interest but also moves the series along at a fast clip. I watched two 45-minute episodes each night over a few weeks and enjoyed being able to follow along (subtitles) and enjoy the culture and scenery while figuring out “who done it”. Nothing difficult like Columbo but challenging enough to make it fun. Schiavone is a bit rogue, but he has a conscience. There is some brief nudity and some disturbing violence, thus the TV-MA warning. If you like detective shows, this one adds a wonderful European flair to the mix and entertains with some interesting characters.
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- Virtue Ethics by David Merry.
- Psychological Approaches to Persona Identity: Do Memories and Consciousness Make Us Who We Are? by Kristin Seemuth Whaley.
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media
- Thomas Nagel reviews The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgely and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics by Menjamin J. B. Lipscomb, and Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman at London Review of Books.
- Sylvia Benhabib reviews Hannah Arendt by Samantha Rose Hill, Rachal Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüden/The Life of a Jewish Woman [Complete Works, Critical Edition, Volume 2] by Hannah Arendt, Arendt by Dana Villa, and An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendy and the Humanities by D.N. Rodowick at The New York Review of Books.
- David Carrier reviews Red Sea–Red Square–Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story by Lydia Goehr at Hyperallergic.
- Oliver Traldi reviews Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side by Robert Talisse at Washington Examiner.
- Ryan Kemp reviews Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, at Hedgehog Review.
- Julian Baggini reviews How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur at The Wall Street Journal.
Literary magazine struggles ?
With The Believer set to be shuttered shortly, Leah Asmelash considers how Long-standing literary magazines are struggling to stay afloat. Where do they go from here ? at CNN.
To state the obvious:
"There's no money in lit mags," said Travis Kurowski, a professor at York College who has studied literary publishing and its history.This is, of course, a big problem -- as the many depressing examples cited here demonstrate.
Reading ‘The Dawn of Everything’ from India: What if the past was a more enlightened place?
Why King Tut Is Still Fascinating New Yorker. And see this Steve Martin classic: King Tut.
Inside the murder of an oil heiress: ‘One of the weirdest in Florida history’ NY Post
The Enduring Power of the Charlatan Los Angeles Review of Books
Why portraits have fascinated us for millennia BBC
- “I have this master plan to transform academic writing to the point where every article and every book is actually interesting and fun to read. I know this is ridiculous” — an interview with Toril Moi (Duke) on how she thinks about writing, the teaching of writing, and the audiences for which she writes
- “If you just think you’re compensating people for past harm, you’re not challenging the system that produced those harms in the first place and will produce tomorrow’s harms” — an interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown) on reparations, the environment, history, and the future
- “Essential to the whole enterprise of Socratic conversation… is a willingness to be refuted. Willingness may be too weak. For Socrates describes rather a positive delight or eagerness to be refuted” — Andrew Beer (Christendom College) on the benefits of being refuted
- “In the land of the infinite, the bullet-biting utilitarian train runs out of track… [and] infinite ethics is a problem for everyone, not just utilitarians” — Joe Carlsmith (Oxford) discusses the fascinating problems that infinities bring to ethics
- “What Makes Heavy Metal ‘Heavy’?” — figuring that out is itself a pretty heavy task, argues Jason Miller (Warren Wilson College)
- New developments in plagiarism: AI paraphrasing tools — one professor’s experience detecting its use by a student