A collection of 57 posts
The intermingling of elements—culture, language, religion—is celebrated, while the concept of purity in identity and culture is repudiated as too constricting.
The real-life Tolkien, who loathed trite allegory, would have cringed.
An even moderately careful reading of Lolita should make it quite clear that it’s anything but a “celebration” of child rape.
The world of the left generally, and of LGBT identity politics specifically, wasn’t always focused on infinite fragmentation within sects.
The issue was that when a white playwright’s work was produced, casting directors were assuming that they should cast white actors. We were all aghast.
No reason to believe that classics as a field has had any particular tendency towards white supremacism either in the present or in the past.
If we are looking for a civilization that never engaged in mass violence or destruction, we’re unlikely to find one.
As Thomas Paine wrote, “To argue with someone who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
Children get a wider perspective when they’re tugged out of the here and now for a little while each day. In an enchanted hour, we can read them stories of the real and imagined past.
Appiah is wrong to pretend that distinct civilizations were never a thing.
Salinger has been posthumously relegated to the limbo of #MeToo-tainted, “problematic” cultural figures, which probably accounts for the awkward half-silence around his centenary.
I refuse to be discouraged by the sort of novel-gone-to-the-dogs pessimism that has been around for generations.