O’Brian as an author met the requirement indicated by the latter phrase, but during the first years of my acquaintance with his writing, I knew nothing about the man. Nor did I come across many people in New York literary society who were conversant with his books. Those few of his readers whom I chanced [...]
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This is an illustration from the Chicago Tribune reproduced by Paula S. Fass in her article “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture” (Journal of American History, 80.3 [1993]: 919-953). The phrenological imagination did not disappear as quickly as you might assume. The panspermic fragment of Anaxagoras—when was it [...]
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I’m enjoying The Puppet and the Dwarf at the moment. Žižek reminds me much of McLuhan. Facts don’t matter for either. In the space of a few pages, Žižek has claimed that Martin Luther King made a radical anti-capitalist turn in the last few weeks before his death and that the Japanese Army relied on [...]
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An answer to these queries came to me last summer as I stood looking at the Roman aqueduct at Tarragona, which, after so many centuries, still lifts its simple tawny arches against the pale-blue sky. The men who laid these stones, I thought, and the many generations who followed them, were in the main absorbed [...]
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The defining quote from Jane Mayer’s article: Surnow once appeared as a guest on Ingraham’s show; she told him that, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, “it was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt better.” Surnow joked, “We love to torture terrorists—it’s good for you!” James Surowiecki did [...]
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Readers of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory may recall that he quotes this newspaper account of how the average subject can help with the war effort. I wonder if our Alexander thought of it in that fleeting moment when he thought himself in charge. I can remember watching that unfold on my [...]
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