The Approach to J.L. Borges
Ed Simon
Consider just how bizarre fiction is.
A renewed attention to the American literary tradition may be one of the most important imaginative and spiritual exercises for restoring our liberal way of life.
Shakespeare’s plays are full of suicides, some noble, others not very.
Intellectualism’s core activity is analysis—investigating how and why certain occurrences take place around us.
If politics is your life, then you must tell yourself a political story in order to live.
One big and enduring reason Jerry trusted me is that he sensed that I was no stranger to the dark spot in the wood—something we shared in common.
If I have to stand on my own two feet, epistemically, how can I be sure that my knowledge really is knowledge?
Anne Sexton is familiar with the dark night of the soul felt in the body.
Every country needs triangulation in order to achieve self-understanding and prudent decision-making.
Doctors need a medical humanities that does more than just help them see health and disease through a patient’s eyes.
Even in a technological age, Albert Borgmann believed we can still have what is real.
This fall marks Tommy Tate’s twentieth year as a crossing guard for the city of Washington, DC.
Scheherazade’s story is about stories themselves.
As he roamed the edges of Lake Como, Romano Guardini foresaw the birth of a new world.
Attentional humility opens us to sympathetic reading—a willingness to receive from the text on the author’s own terms.
H.P. Lovecraft’s verse advances a startlingly modern metaphysic.
Only through regular injections of human writing can the models improve and the machines stay up to date.
I don’t like this collapse of trust; I don’t like being in a technological arms race with my students.
I have a very hard time believing that most people can see things.
The ironic result of the triumph of the machine may be the creation of an ecosystem in which supra-rational gnostic appeals flourish.
Camus embodied an existence that was itself conflicted, caught between the vectors of history and lived experience.
Trump is a man for our moment. Both that man and moment are less authoritarian than anarchic.
If you read Frost for the snow, but don’t feel the cold, then you’re not really reading Frost
Dick Allen faced racist taunts and boos so numerous and unrelenting that he became the first player in baseball to wear his batting helmet out in the field.
What looks like a disastrous collapse in students’ literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.
There is a poignant vulnerability to dereliction pipe organs face in a world saturated with synthetically produced musical sound.
What pleasure, what gratification, can we offer to people that exceeds the pleasure of hating?
I like to think that this kind of deference is a Baltimore thing.
What are the implications for any society that emphasizes monuments to power and domination over imagination and the arts?
Is it possible to imagine the ballet world without a primary teleology of aesthetic perfectionism and a baseline of low self-worth?
The greatest characters possess an irrepressible vitality.
Understanding the extent of the threat posed by Bibi requires a broad historical perspective.
The emptiness of words, and our shared resignation to meaning manipulation, is no small matter.
The historical novel strives to recreate not only the material dimensions of a past age but also its mindset.
The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.
The language of self-censorship removes the question from the moral realm in which it properly belongs.
Dostoevsky is too Christian for a secular age and too secular for Christendom.
Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it.
Could it be otherwise? Probably not, at least at the moment.
The special challenge of presenting a poet whose work is neither new nor widely known.
I remember hearing the news and thinking that this was going to end badly for everyone. I had no idea just how bad things would get.
Could we ban cell phone photography in museums and at performances?
Memories are important because—and when—they are selective, and few.
Much of what we know is unspeakable, and language is but one expressive medium.
Consider another problem of motivation in the house of fiction: why characters write.
Kundera chose to take the long view, reflecting on the relationship between the Jews and Europe, and, more broadly, on the Jews and that European, literary spirit to which he saw himself heir.
The literature classroom is an unusually fit environment in which to pursue “the deepening and sharpening of emotional powers.”
Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical.
There is a familiar feeling here: existential dread, impending doom, a light dose of despair.
Kundera’s novels are expansive and support irreconcilable yet arguably valid points of view.
That I have no idea who Barbara Walters is doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that this is the Times.
Cormac McCarthy is provoking us more than we may realize.
Plausible forecasts may help us avert the worst political calamities.
The official publication day came and went. I felt weirdly out of it, waiting for something I had anticipated for half my life and worked toward unremittingly.
The answer cannot simply come in the form of another list of dos-and-don’ts.
Whether or not we find beauty in rhetoric, its eloquence depends on its power to persuade.
The cultural legacy of Bruno Schulz.
Considering the purpose of free speech, from courts to classrooms.
Calvino recognized the digital age as an existential condition as well as a technological one.
We can aim to harmonize with our phones through ritual.
What might the world look like if we refined our understanding of progress?
The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.
It took the roiling events of 1963 to open the ears and hearts of the American public to the Beatles.
It is time for the tech world to start thinking institutionally.
The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist.
What to become? Dissident or emigrant? Move abroad?
His writing became Ellroyian—telegraphic, fast-paced, and intellectually cynical.
Does the Meta-Birkin seriously compromise consumers’ ability to separate the NFT from the real Hermès bag?
Hope Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded.
What if Ann Rutledge had lived, and she and Lincoln had married?
An institution entering the last of its salad days while still running on the fumes of its preening self-importance.
Benedict shared with skeptics, postmodernists, and existentialists the suspicion of the modern trust in the benevolence of the human will.
In the output of the AI generated image, the technique is there but the techne is not.
The central truths revealed to me by psilocybin were all the things my mother tried to teach me.
What makes this so difficult is that time has a way of eroding the power of words.
What we are seeing, then, is a fictional spectacle—a pseudo-iconoclastic event.
The world circa 2000 was not Napoleonic.
The genealogical approach has found surprising success in an unlikely genre.
Jean-Luc Godard, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is worth paying attention to even when we think his work is bad
Viktor Orbán has become a canvas for the projection of hopes and fears about the future of democracy in the West.
It is my belief that rapid technological “progress” will always threaten a culture with social regress, and that mitigating that threat should be a priority.
We can learn from the outdated Western Civ model, even as we transcend it.
Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.
Cognitive wellness culture proposes to curate our attention so that we can better spend it.
Any attempt to create a monoculture is necessarily self-defeating.
There is no shortage of jeremiads about the American university.
We have here two very different approaches to spiritual authenticity.
Where is culture that gave humanity the symphonies and operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov?
The war has ruined any chance of Russo-Western cooperation any time soon; whatever hope the Biden administration has had of peeling Russia away from China lies in tatters.
Ukraine has become the geography of vicious truths
Big data can’t save us from mental distresses and disorders.
We’ll have to confront the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior
Just as Mims worries now over the unfulfilling tedium of employment at Amazon, Smith worried over the deleterious effects of monotonous work.
Mainline Protestant ministries to migrants had unintentionally opened the door to their diminished cultural dominance
Well, then, why—on Kierkegaard’s view—would anyone choose a life of faith?
The red vs. blue electoral map has contributed to the toxicity of our politics.
Media executives have honed the craft of attracting national interest to flair-ups and clashes over school board proceedings, controversial small business practices, or more recently, police misconduct.
Can we excuse the bigotry of a writer whose books are so hip and full of life and infectious that you can’t put them down?
Once you see that even those you disagree with most strongly normally have something important to say, debates become dialogues.
Often poignant, sometimes humorous, and always searching explorations of our cultural experiences and predicaments
Nature knows what is best for itself better than we do.
Perhaps computers are so bad at conversation because it is something like prayer.
Because this cannot be ignored. And because it may be prologue to the future.
The benefits of the humanities have danced so gracefully through these tutorials that it’s never occurred to any of us to ask what’s the point.
I observed that the most effective communicators delivered the most histrionic performances.
The modern state is founded on a dream—the dream of perfect knowledge that secures perfect power.
Throughout the book, Sherrell eschews the phrase “climate crisis,” substituting a much more nebulous term: “the Problem.”
Even defenders of the idea today such as Bruno Latour admit that Gaia in the original Greek context is “a figure of violence."
We are here to ponder the longue durée of mutton in an age of capitalist wolves.
It would be prudent to take the Chinese at their word––especially if it is bound up in the mystifying language of Carl Schmitt.
Perhaps the older Auden merely wants to have the humility to accept the terms on which agape offers itself.
The secrets of Jerusalem are also lodged in Jacksonville, Joplin, and Joliet
Postliberalism comes to embody a form of cultural criticism that ultimately does not believe in culture itself.
It’s easy to see how lectures got a bad rap. We have all been subjected to someone who abused the privilege of an audience.
One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs.
Reading and interpreting poetry offers a unique way to cultivate ethical knowledge and therefore bears on collective, and not just individual, life.
To measure the Wealth of Nations, you had to inspect the shirts on people’s backs and the shoes on their feet.
As the titans of big tech see it, the reticence to upgrade is nothing less than resistance to progress. But a willingness to upgrade does not benefit customers in the long run.
Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas.
It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.
We need to preserve a distinction between recognizing our transgressions and resolving to change, on one hand, and imagining that we can forgive ourselves, on the other.
The gap between our concepts of love and justice has served us poorly.
Why read long books? Well, if you have to ask…
The man who approached me on Chartres Street looked like he’d been tossed away.
The Internet is a technical system that has reshaped social roles and relationships in ways that we are at this point far from fully understanding. We are living out the terms of the new social contract.
Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.
A human spirit of community and kindness can be learned. But it can also be forgotten.
A lesson in what it takes to be a father, and why a kid might want to have one.
Faulkner’s treatment of the past means much for the nature of our future.
What’s up with us humans, us American humans, that we’re committing ourselves more and more to unbending postures?
According to current usage, privilege means something like good fortune.
Just as the first detective was a thief, the first superheroes were supervillains.
Ignorance is ugly, particularly in prison. It’s loud and obnoxious and violent. It tumbles into my cell right now as I write this. But for some, education can quell that.
With our colleagues, and with our students, we have the space not only to express disagreement in more than tweets and sound bites, but also to probe the reasons underlying our disagreement.
Why should we expect that the inner self waiting to be born corresponds to some paid job or profession?
We Americans have a soft spot for the outlaw. But what distinguishes an outlaw from a criminal?
Cormac McCarthy gives us 500 pages of idiosyncratic wordplay without even cheap narrative excitement. Who does he think he is? Joyce? Faulkner? Melville? Well, yes.
Reimagining our cities provides us an important opportunity to reconsider the various structures of urban life.
“Normal” intimate relationships for teenagers have shifted toward a more explicit instrumentalism.
Have teenage friendships become more instrumental?
The greater the gap students must overcome, the less likely their expressed expectations are likely to be fulfilled.
Tests lower student morale and make them more cynical about the educational process.
Do Trump’s supporters represent a new Know-Nothing movement?
Thoreau’s ethic of self-governance was a starting point for reconstituting a freshly awakened culture on a moral foundation that refused to accept the sort of compromises—including the Missouri Compromise—that confirmed the moral impotence he so loathed.
New digital technologies are creating new forms of social invisibility and changing the nature of postmodern culture.
A translation of English to English presumes that ambiguity of language is always a flaw—but it’s not.
According to Sherry Turkle's latest book, my peers and I simply can’t stand sitting alone with our thoughts, and it’s hurting our capacity for intimacy.
What began as one of the most popular forms of menswear has now morphed into the kindler, gentler uniform. First, there was blue collar. Then white collar. Now there’s soft collar.
Bernie Sanders at Liberty University is more than a momentary truce in the culture war.
We do not know how to evaluate what makes up a good college education.
In India's rush to transform, build, and even engineer entire new cities, critics are right to raise concerns about citizenship and access.
Within the literature on elites, status tends to be relatively ignored or neglected in favor of economic and political power.
Cities are increasingly being eyed by tech companies for their social dynamism and ability to generate innovation. This will have tremendous consequences for the future of society.
When El Greco heard the insultingly low valuation for his work, he launched a long and bitter court battle that quietly changed the perception of artists and art in Spain.
One of the most salient features of the post–World War II suburb was its localization of the American middle class and its propagation of practices of mass consumption.
Thinking about homeless requires separating it from the larger discourse on poverty.
Returning to base, Davis and the other pilots heard their orders for the next day: Attack Kiska Harbor with everything they had regardless of the weather.
That Edvard Munch never met Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the great missed encounters of the modern age.
What happens if we become willing to trade in an understanding of a rich and meaning-laden feature of our nature for, well, something we can share with a rat.
What's the real-world significance of arguing in a New York Times op-ed that life doesn't exist? More than we might initially think.
Images continue to matter in a culture thoroughly saturated by them.