Saturday, October 31, 2020

History has its eyes on us

 

“I am so sorry my writing vexes you, and it will continue to vex you! I do not in the least agree with your assumption that one kind of writing is right and another kind is wrong. I write at all because it pleases and amuses me -- and I write in the way that pleases and amuses me.”  

Write for Jozef



How Did We Come To Think Of History As A Coherent Narrative?

The idea of history as “something that equally comprises past and future as states of a continuous subject, so that we may speak of history as such” (as the philosopher Eckart Förster puts it), emerged only in the second half of the 18th century. – Chronicle of Higher Education


WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH GLENN GREENWALD IS A VOICE OF SANITY: The InterceptCo-Founder Glenn Greenwald Resigns, Alleging ‘Censorship’ of Views ‘Critical’ of Joe Biden.


Carbon Club - Book Former Liberal senator Cory Bernardi’s use of US-inspired strategies to bring down Malcolm Turnbull as party leader in 2009 was a key moment in Australia’s history of climate inaction, according to Marian Wilkinson.


The Carbon Club with Marian Wilkinson



What makes Chekhov unique? His perception, his ability to discern the subtlest emotional shades of human experience. Gary Saul Morson explains Chekhov 


Jew, poet, homosexual, painter, punster, novelist, critic, palm-reader, ether-addict, Kabbalist, Catholic: Who was Max Jacob 


Books bound in human skin have a long history, though one less sensational and more ambiguous than the urban  legends  


Articles of Note

Every writer is unique in some way; D.H. Lawrence was unique in many ways: his prose style, his personality, his opinions. George Scialabba explains... pausing for  prose 


New Books

A new biography of Lucian Freud withholds gossip into “private affairs.” That’s a shame — Freud’s private affairs propelled his  art 


Essays & Opinions

Does history really “have its eyes on us,” as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George Washington says? Where did this idea come from, Anyway? 



The mob is drunk on the new power that surveillance provides them, seemingly unaware of the many ways it could come back to bite them  Next