A collection of 206 posts
Five decades after its release, Wake in Fright remains a brutally captivating reminder that modernity is just a thin veneer over the darker recesses of the human heart.
I. On April 18th of this year, Blake Bailey, 58, the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, was abruptly dropped by his literary agency, the Story Company. His book had been published on April 6th, and climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. But then allegations emerged that while
Like it or not, hidden within those influential texts are the bizarre jargon and lunatic assertions of a mendacious madman.
By rejecting any universally applicable standards of reason, it destroys the possibility of true conversation, of learning from and compromising with each other.
When one woman refused and snapped at them to “go away,” they attacked her with a chair and mop handle.
In his 2000 memoir A Personal Odyssey, Sowell recounts a parable that was read to him as a young boy and which he never forgot.
I have never seen a dream present something I believed to be untrue.
The environmental havoc is justified as needed for the economy, but the evidence does not support this claim.
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.
Calling Hezbollah merely a terror group is too simplistic, and nothing in Lebanon is ever simple or easy to explain.
Despite the uncertainties and tensions that characterize modern political life, we would do well to remember that the future we want is never the future we actually get, and that civilisation will outlast the fragility of politics.
Easy Rider is an important movie—much more important than a simple measure of its quality would suggest—which is probably why the American Film Institute, among others, continues to rate it so highly.
Hitchens didn’t just see how identity politics could warp a person’s ideas and principles—he understood that it could replace them altogether.
The struggle between the two middle classes is not just a matter of wealth and power, but also of retaining the social basis for democracy itself.
Mishima’s reputation has grown in the new century and today there is more serious interest in his work than ever before.