Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

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  • Population Bombs

    Population was to the 1970s what climate change is to today. Academia was in a frenzy, governments dragged their feet, and disaster seemed unavoidable anyway. The Al Gore of that period was Paul Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford who wrote the mega-bestseller The Population Bomb. After the mass starvations he had imagined for the…

  • List of Human Sacrifices

    Yesterday I had the great privilege of visiting for the first time the Mayan ruins at Palenque, in Chiapas, Mexico. Astonishing. Part of the conversation among my family as we walked through these stone shells of palaces, temples, and dwellings only recently unveiled from the rainforest was about whether the people who lived there were…

  • Living in Lists

    Do you make lists? Are you one of those people who, according to caricature, have no rest until the things of their lives rest in a list? Who don’t feel even their own being until being properly listed—be it by Google or by Post-It? Or else, perhaps, are you one of those who so valiantly…

  • Christmas Cheer

    In the apartment just below mine, the lady has done a marvelous job of decorating. The door is covered in foil (reminiscent of the Throne of the Third Heaven) and there is a whole wall of Santa Claus-related elements. There’s even a shrine to the troops on the far wall, with the injunction, “Bring them…

  • The Artist of the Beautiful

    My report on Harun Yahya for Seed magazine just went up. It is a small sketch—a longer discussion with more context is set for the March/April issue of Search magazine, inshallah, etc. This one narrows in on some of the minutiae of meeting Adnan Oktar (the man behind the Yahya name) and his friends, as…

  • Questions for Mark Lilla

    The Social Science Research Council has just posted on its website an interview I did with Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia and, most recently, author of The Stillborn God. We had a most pleasant conversation. In particular, I asked about his experience of the discussion about his book on the SSRC’s blog, The…

  • The Feast of Father Louis

    In the Catholic Church, it is traditional to celebrate a saint not on the day of his or her birth, as we do for American presidents, but on the day of death. Part of the reason is that so many of the saints were martyrs, whose status depends precisely on the way they died. They…

  • 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…

  • Herzog’s Apocalypse

    The best scene of Werner Herzog’s hand-held documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, shows an errant penguin heading off for the mountains, for the vast center of the continent. Not, that is, with his fellows to the sea for food, or even to the colony to mate and sit on eggs.…

  • 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…