Printed Word Matters

RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY, THE RUSSIAN STATE, AND THE RUSSIAN NATION

In the 1996 presidential election campaign, Russian President Boris Yeltsin asked the Russian people to reconstitute themselves as a democratic people with a Western orientation. Since his first election in 2000, current Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked the Russian people to reconsider that identity and to reconstitute themselves once again as a powerful nation with interests distinct from those of the West. He has done this primarily through redefinition of the foundational terms of W

THE PIECES | AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES WILSON | By Paul Willetts

<div>I must admit that I’m not one of those people who’s obsessed by 1960s music, yet I was immediately captivated by The Pieces, which portrays the brief career and mysterious life of a fictional late 1960s British folk singer...</div>

HEDGEHOGS, DEATH AND THE BEAUTY IN THE MUNDANE: HOW PHILIP LARKIN CUTS SO DEEP

<div>Fear of mortality, the fragility of relationships, the beauty lurking in the everyday. These are common themes in modern poetry — cliches, even. Yet in the hands of a master poet, they feel vibrant and fresh. Such was the skill of Philip Larkin, a defining poet of the 20th Century. But to truly appreciate that skill, we need to lean close to Larkin’s techniques and process...</div>

THE LAST AND FIRST ROMANTIC

<div>A Secular Age was Taylor’s diagnosis, but in Cosmic Connections he offers a prescription. Across almost six-hundred pages Taylor presents an erudite compendium of arguments and close readings, but many will be familiar with the rather archaic (though by no means inaccurate) form of the philosopher’s claim – that the means of connection, meaning, and transcendence in a disenchanted world must be fundamentally aesthetic, that they must be poetic...</div>

THE SCIENCE OF ONE: PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM

It’s often said that the first philosopher was Thales of Miletus, born in the 7th century BCE. His big idea was that everything is made of water. In hindsight, this is not such a good idea. Even watermelon is only 92% water. But there’s actually a very profound thought in Thales’ idea. To wit: although the world seems like it’s made of so many different things, of all different colors and shapes and sizes and consistencies, behind this appearance of baffling multiplicity lies a hidden unity. Dee

MILTON IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Only a few short decades after the Spanish had razed Tenochtitlan, the rubble of her limestone and adobe bricks which once constituted the foundations of temples to Xitle and Quetzalcoatl repurposed by the conquerors in the erection of their Metropolitan Cathedral, the triumphant Aztec capital of broad, cactus lined boulevards and massive pyramids, intimidating ball courts and sumptuous canals of blue glinting in the hot Mexican sun, was as if a desert mirage, a chimera, an illusion...

I WOULD PREFER NOT TO: THE EPITAPH OF HERMAN MELVILLE

<div>In 1965 my friend decided to take a day off school and visit the grave of Herman Melville. Melville was just coming back into style as a great American writer, and my friend had become enamored of the nautical world of the novels. Wishing to pay tribute to that great author, and having learned from Melville how important navigation was, he planned his route from Brooklyn to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx, and took the train uptown, sure the rest would be easy...</div>

BACKLIGHT: TECHNOLOGY AGAINST EVIL

<div>Man is locked in his physical and digital cell, blinded by the lights, as the singer sings, with that deep, Kafkaesque, not fully conscious sense of being completely alone in a 'cold and empty city of sin,' with no one around to judge him,' but in fact only alone and judged. Judged not by people like him - that wouldn't solve the problem of evil - but by technology, an increasingly autonomous creature of the human mind...</div>

AUGUSTO DEL NOCE AND TRANSHUMANISM

<div>With the publication of Francis Bacon's 1620 'Novum Organum' ( New Tool)1 there began the Enlightenment march towards the 'singularity'. It entailed a belief in empiricism and scientific knowledge. It began what Francis Fukuyama would label as 'the world's most dangerous idea': Transhumanism...</div>

TO TRANSLATE NELLIGAN

<div>The challenge and reward of formal poetry do not lie in mastery of the formal aspects alone. They certainly are a matter of craftsmanship, but unless they serve a subject, they never amount to artistry. And mastery requires not only achieving the numbers, but achieving them with the appearance of inevitability: without tortured syntax, unnatural diction, and so on...</div>

FABRICATING DREAMS | ON HOW AN UNKNOWN PUBLISHER IN EDO JAPAN ENTICED THE WORLD

In the early 1830s the owner of the small-scale publishing house Hōeidō in the Nihonbashi area of Edo (Tokyo), Takenouchi Magohachi, met with Andō Tokutarō -aka Utagawa Hiroshige-, an unconventional amateur artist from the samurai class. We can only imagine how the two set their plan out for the most formidable series ever printed in Japan: the 53 stations of the Tokaido. In fact, little did they know that with this series, conceived originally as a profitable venture, they would firmly establis

COMPLICITY OR COMPLACENCY? JUDGING JUDGES IN AUTHORITARIAN STATES | By Raymond Wacks

<div>Courts personify the law. In the more grandiloquent accounts of the legal system judges are depicted as its custodians, guardians of its values: sentinels of justice and fair play. They embody fairness, evenhandedness, and impartiality. And an independent judiciary is among the hallmarks of the rule of law. The jurist, Ronald Dworkin, memorably observed that ‘courts are the capitals of law’s empire, and judges are its princes’...</div>

WRITING THE SELF | By Michel Foucault

<div>Self-writing clearly appears here in its complementary relation to anchoritism; it offsets the dangers of solitude; it exposes what one has done or thought to a possible gaze; the fact of being obliged to write fills the role of companion by inciting human respect and shame. One can thus posit a primary analogy: that which others are to the ascetic in his community the notebook will be to him in his solitude....</div>

MUSIC OF THE DEVIL-1955 | By Myron S. Lubell

<div>They called my generation of teenagers 'juvenile delinquents' – mainly because of our'wild and crazy' music. Drugs weren’t a major problem in the mid-1950’s, and the 'sexual revolution' hadn’t started. I’m not saying we didn’t think about sex – we sure did, a lot – but the 'respectable' girls knew how to say NO – at least with me...</div>

PHARMAKON: CULTURE AND REALITY

<div>Has culture ever been separated from practical life? Culture has different forms: high culture, mass culture, national culture, local culture, family culture, political culture, Christian culture, secular culture, and so on. Culture is the form of practical life. And practical life is the living substance of culture...</div>

HOW HUMOUR LAID THE WORLD BARE, FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT | Katharina Van Cauteren

<div>Homer’s gods can roar with laughter. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and the rest of the cabal — grinning, giggling, splitting their sides. Anything man can do, the gods can do better. The Greek pantheon is a projection of the terrestrial on to the celestial. It’s only when God becomes man that he stops laughing. Jesus doesn’t do stand-up. There are no gags in the Bible, no guffaws or gales of laughter. The Christian faith is an awfully serious thing...</div>

VEILS OF DISTORTION: HOW THE NEWS MEDIA WARPS OUR MINDS

<div>Anyone who’s followed the news for decades has noticed without fail that coverage has tilted more and more towards stories about celebrities and all manner of trivial conflicts between members of the public. What was once the sole domain of what we call 'tabloid' news has spread to become a fixture of most mainstream news outfits....</div>

ANIL SETH ON THE HARD PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

How could any kind of physical processing give rise to any kind of experience, any rich life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. So I like this formulation of the hard problem. It basically presupposes a kind of view of the universe where there is stuff, a kind of materialist starting point, and then asks how and why is consciousness part of that picture? To me, that includes the second version of the way you put it, which is: okay, then how and why is it t

THE PALE HORSE OF OLYMPIC CEREMONY

<div>One Friday night, over the dark tides of the Seine, the river that cuts through the body of Paris, the ancient city of Catholic and secular faith, a metal horse with a rider on it appeared. It came from the Pont d'Austerlitz, galloping toward the Eiffel Tower. Water poured out that night, horizontally from above as rain and vertically from below as a river...</div>

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL WON’T GO AWAY

The Devil has stalked the pages of journalist Randall Sullivan’s and Ed Simon’s books, a whiff of sulfur apparent across the pages of their writing. Both authors have long been concerned with theodicy, with the question of evil; how such misfortune and wickedness is possible in a world created by a benevolent and omnipotent God. Central to that question has been a preoccupation with ultimate evil, the manner in which absolute and metaphysical malignancy has been represented across the Abrahamic