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Tag Archives: new york times
Complaint Box | Picky Eaters
by Susan Goldberg
from The New York Times
Having friends over for dinner used to involve a minimal and fairly unremarkable to-do list: There were groceries to buy, along with flowers and a couple of bottles of semi-respectable wine. I would put out some guest towels and a collection of fancy soaps that were off limits to [...]
Posted in articles, comment/analysis Also tagged eating habits, kosher, restrictive diets, veganism, vegeterianism Leave a comment
The Critic's Critic
by Harold Bloom
from The New York Times
It has been three centuries since Dr. Johnson was born, on Sept. 7, 1709. He died on Dec. 13, 1784, still struggling for the mixed blessing of more life. His Falstaffian vitalism is always my first thought when I reread, teach again or continue brooding upon the canonical critic [...]
20 Years of Collapse
by Slavoj Žižek
from The New York Times
Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the [...]
Posted in articles, comment/analysis, philosophy, politics Also tagged berlin wall, communism, political history of europe, zizek Leave a comment
Kierkegaard on the Couch
by Gordon Marino
from The New York Times
All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of [...]
Why Is She Smiling?
by Jay McInerneyfrom THE NEW YORK TIMES
For the past 20 years or so, Richard Powers seems to have been engaged in a prodigious attempt to redress the imbalance of knowledge that was the subject of C. P. Snow’s famous “Two Cultures” lecture. That, you will recall, was the one in which Snow, a British scientist [...]
Posted in articles, philosophy, review Also tagged c.p. snow, richard powers, sciences vs humanities Leave a comment
When Writers Speak
by Arthur Krystalfrom THE NEW YORK TIMES
That’s Vladimir Nabokov on my computer screen, looking both dapper and disheveled. He’s wearing a suit and a multibuttoned vest that scrunches the top of his tie, making it poke out of his shirt like an old-fashioned cravat. Large, lumpish, delicate and black-spectacled, he’s perched on a couch alongside [...]
Critical Care
by Robert B. Reichfrom THE NEW YORK TIMES
This timely and insightful book puts Barack Obama’s current quest for universal health insurance in historical context and gives new meaning to the audacity of hope. Universal health care has bedeviled, eluded or defeated every president for the last 75 years. Franklin Roosevelt left it out of Social [...]
Posted in comment/analysis, current affairs, politics Also tagged healthcare, obama, politics, us Leave a comment
Poet of Desolate Landscapes
by Jonathan Lethemfrom THE NEW YORK TIMES
By the time J. G. Ballard died in April of this year, talk of his long struggle with cancer should have prepared his followers (“fans” is too pale a word for the devotion Ballard inspired), yet the news still came as a shock. Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist, [...]
Even Bigger Than Too Big to Fail