What Is #DisruptTexts?
The disrupters rely on rhetorical devices such as replacing the passive “under-represented” with the active “marginalized,” “erased,” and “excluded.”
Lona Manning
· 9 min read
Books
A collection of 205 posts
The Hustler and the Queen
NOTE: This essay contains spoilers. The surprise success of the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit has brought me a great deal of delight—I’m a longtime fan of both the novel and its author, Walter Tevis. Just this summer, I wrote an essay about all the great American
Kevin Mims
· 14 min read
The Heretical Impulse: Zamyatin and Orwell
Anglophone readers may be tempted to call Zamyatin a Russian Orwell, but the description works equally well in the reverse.
Riley Moore
· 8 min read
Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars—A Review
Most instructors on campus who revealed their political views also showed themselves to be a part of the Left
Clayton Trutor
· 8 min read
Gender Activists Are Trying to Cancel My Book. Why is Silicon Valley Helping Them?
This is what censorship looks like in 21st-century America.
Abigail Shrier
· 9 min read
My Own Private Chateau—Pauline Réage's 'Story of O' Revisited
Our culture makes a well intentioned but dangerous error in taking every thought experiment, every utterance, every representation, every fantasy of sexual expression seriously.
Marilyn Simon
· 15 min read
For Some Adjunct Professors, It's Speak Your Mind versus Keep Your Job
Ilana Redstone and John Villasenor
· 8 min read
George Orwell, Henry Miller, and the 'Dirty-Handkerchief Side of Life'
Like Miller, Orwell didn’t just focus on the “dirty-handkerchief side of life”—he repeatedly confessed to the dirty-handkerchief side of his own personality.
Matt Johnson
· 15 min read
Analyst of Totalitarianism—Reading Simon Leys Today
One general conclusion from reading Leys is that although totalitarian movements are immensely dangerous, that doesn’t mean we should give the theories behind them much intellectual weight.
David Adler
· 15 min read
Oscar Wilde’s UtopiaOscar Wilde’s Utopia
The novel’s composition is a bit cobbled, which Amis acknowledges when he says that he pities the reviewer who has to cross the whole thing front-to-back, recommending instead that the book be taken up at random and read in leaps and snatches.
Jared Marcel Pollen
· 9 min read
Postmodernism: Some Corrections and Clarifications
Compared to the titans of modernism, postmodernists—despite a handful of interesting thinkers like Barthes and Derrida—are no more than garden gnomes.
Elena Shalneva
· 8 min read
The Dishonest and Misogynistic Hate Campaign Against J.K. Rowling
And it turns out that she was, because despite the best efforts of her critics, she hasn’t yet been truly cancelled.
Louise Perry
· 7 min read
Corruption and Remorse—The Novels of a Watergate Conspirator
As an avid reader of pop fiction, I’m more partial to the Nixon administration than any other White House. The Reagan years may have produced more crooks, and the Trump years may have produced more chaos, but there is one measure by which the criminal and criminal-adjacent members of
Kevin Mims
· 19 min read
Under the Frog: Why Tibor Fischer’s 1992 Booker-Nominated Novel May Have Found its Moment
Under the Frog was based on his Magyar parents, both of them basketball players who, in the wake of the doomed 1956 uprising against the Soviets, fled Hungary for Britain.
Robin Ashenden
· 11 min read
At the Intersection of Art and Science: Revisiting EO Wilson’s 'Consilience'
Artists and scientists have a reductionist’s idea of one another and perceive the other as a threat.
Clint Margrave
· 6 min read