For Some Adjunct Professors, It's Speak Your Mind versus Keep Your Job
Ilana Redstone and John Villasenor
· 8 min read
Books
A collection of 214 posts
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
The WEIRDest People in the World—A Review
WEIRD individuals are psychologically peculiar in a number of ways.
Alex Mackiel
· 7 min read
'Science Fictions' Review: Begone, Science Swindlers
Science Fictions is engaging, story-led, and well-organised. It will equip my sad young friend to articulate what went wrong with his charity’s study on literacy and, as importantly, to do the next one well.
Rosalind Arden
· 10 min read
Flannery O'Connor and the Ideological War on Literature
What cancel culture has just mown down isn’t simply Flannery O’Connor or her works, but our ability to view them through any other lens except that of doctrine.
Charlotte Allen
· 13 min read
Chinese Science Fiction's Disaster Dystopias
Rather than the emergence of a China-dominated world order, as some in the West and many in Beijing propose, science fiction writers illuminate realities that could end up reprising the failures of the former Soviet Union.
Joel Kotkin
· 9 min read
At a Time Like This, the West Could Use Its Own Vladimir Voinovich
Voinovich’s legacy has a personal aspect for me.
Cathy Young
· 15 min read
Lord Over All: Alexander the Great's Conquered World of Priests and Pagans
The poverty of Macedon made incense rarer than in Greece or the Near East, and it also made offerings rarer.
F.S. Naiden
· 14 min read