February 2012
300 posts
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“The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world...”
– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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Absent Things as if They Are Present →
Essay on the practice of erasures in literature.
The dictionary defines erase as “to scrape or rub out (anything written, engraved, etc.); to efface, expunge, obliterate.” Its Latin root roughly translates as “to scrape away.” These definitions imply loss and destruction. They call to mind Richard Nixon’s audio-tape gaps, the photographic manipulations of Stalin, the Archimedes Palimpsest,...
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"We live in fear of a massacre" →
Marie Colvin was the only British journalist reporting from inside the besieged Syrian enclave of Baba Amr. This is her final report.
I entered Homs on a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches. Arriving in the darkened city in the early hours, I was met by a welcoming party keen for foreign journalists to reveal the...
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A Night in Arzamas →
How Tolstoy’s obsession with mortality became a teachable moment.
In 1869, just after he finished War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis as the result of an incident during a journey through the city of Arzamas, which is on the Tyosha River about 250 miles east of Moscow. As he described it in his unfinished story Notes of a Madman (so titled because Tolstoy was ...
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“In the end, nothing else differentiates me from the people among whom I pass my...”
– Jean Amery, At The Mind’s Limits: Contemplations By A Survivor On Auschwitz And Its Realities
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Protecting the Rights of Planet Earth →
“All human beings”, according to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “…are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” This one statement forms the rationale by which the United Nations deemed it necessary to define the structure of...
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Anonymous asked: What are some blogs you recommend?
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“When the newspapers were full of alarms about Iran possibly developing a nuclear...”
– Howard Zinn on Kurt Vonnegut
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The Gospel of Consumption and the Better Future we... →
Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods—the big stuff such as cars and appliances—was thirty-two times higher. Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in...
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“What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of...”
– Voltaire
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Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising... →
More than half of all adults—100 million or so—are currently single; about one in seven, or around 31 million, are living alone. In Manhattan and Washington, D.C., single people make up half of all households. Nationwide, single people now outnumber nuclear families.
This shift, however, has not made American society more atomized or anonymous, explains Eric Klinenberg in his revealing book,...
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“Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor...”
– Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
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A Skeptic's Take on the Public Misunderstanding of... →
On the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday two myths persist about evolution and natural selection.
On July 2, 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote to Charles Darwin to lament how he had been “so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly or at all, the self acting & necessary effects...
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Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell →
“Shooting an Elephant” is an essay by George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in the autumn of 1936 and broadcast by the BBC Home Service on 12 October 1948. The essay describes the experience of the English narrator, possibly Orwell himself, called upon to shoot an aggressive elephant while working as a police officer in Burma. Because the locals expect...
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“A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had...”
– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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Revisiting Vonnegut’s Cradle →
A writer rereads the novel that began his interest in literature.
James Wood, writing in the New Republic, once called Vonnegut “unclassifiable” in the same breath that he grouped him alongside fellow “avant-gardists” turned “mainstreamists”: Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass. He has a point. Cat’s Cradle is at once science fiction and realist first-person narrative, ...
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Gabriel Piterberg on Zionism and Anti-Zionism →
FiveBooks interviews asks writers, academics, and experts to list recommended books on a given topic.
An Israeli historian, who rejects Zionism, tells us about works of scholarship that have challenged the Zionist Israeli narrative of modern history
Zionism is the national political movement dedicated to the establishment and preservation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. You’re an...
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The Myth of the Eight-Hour Sleep →
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their...
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“Optimism,” said Cacambo, “what is that?”
“Alas!”...”
– Voltaire, Candide
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The Xinjiang Procedure →
Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.
To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more. One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice...
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“Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream,...”
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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Super-Predatory Humans: why haven't animals... →
Predators have roamed the planet for 500 million years. The earliest is thought to be some type of simple marine organism, a flatworm maybe or type of crustacean, perhaps a giant shrimp that feasted on ancient trilobites. Much later came the famous predatory dinosaurs such as T. rex, and later still large toothed mammals such as sabre toothed cats or modern wolves.But one or two hundred thousand...
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“Meaning and morality of One’s life come from within oneself. Healthy,...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
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Our Unrealistic Attitudes About Death, Through a... →
I know where this phone call is going. I’m on the hospital wards, and a physician in the emergency room downstairs is talking to me about an elderly patient who needs to be admitted to the hospital. The patient is new to me, but the story is familiar: He has several chronic conditions — heart failure, weak kidneys, anemia, Parkinson’s and mild dementia — all tentatively held in check by a...
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“Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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