Posts
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Giving Bad Directions
Last night, while waiting for a friend at the corner of Lafayette and Bleeker, I learned that to stand at a busy corner near a Manhattan subway entrance means becoming a directions machine. In the course of half an hour, maybe eight people asked me for directions. I’m a guy with a pretty good sense…
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Are Ideas Serious? (Zizek in Jonestown)
Perhaps philosophy today has taken its cue from a world that believes ideas need not be taken seriously. They can be replaced, the policy goes, with stuff like enjoyment, the market, and values. Or else, ideas are simply a subset of those. I myself have argued at times that philosophy might simply be reducible to…
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Fighting over Fundamentals
Well, the election’s over so there’s no chance that anybody will possibly consider publishing this piece. But I thought I’d share my draft here anyway. Let me know what you think. It is an attempt to glean some little wisdom from a failed attempt at being a political pundit. It has become a popular sport…
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What You Mess with When You Mess with Star Trek
The following is cross-posted at Marc Andreottola’s excellent new moving pictures blog, CINEMA IS YOUR SYMPTOM. Keep an eye on that one, believe me. The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook…
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Reading Everything (and More)
Reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ at once reminds me why I write in the first place while also being so good as to tempt me to give up and quit trying. The book tells the story, starting with the Greeks, of how Cantor ended up developing a set…
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Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Last night, Dr. Atomic closed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and I saw it from standing room. I have already written about a slow opera with big hopes, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha—this is another. What is it about these new operas, which have to turn every historical event into a funeral march? In John Adams’s presentation…
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Ways of Using Science
The most promising approach in the study of the relationship between “science and religion” today is not to talk about them at all. Neither the warfare model—where the two domains are utterly at odds—nor harmony one—that they are mutually supportive—quite captures the historical and epistemological evidence. Stephen J. Gould’s vision of “non-overlapping magesteria” is a…
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Obama’s Harlem
After giving up on the excruciating computer graphics and talking heads of MSNBC’s election coverage, my friends and I got on the train and headed up to Harlem. We arrived at 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard not a minute before Barack Obama was declared winner. The enormous crowd, pouring into the streets far…