Not very long ago I spent some time in Frankfurt’s Museum f?r Moderne Kunst looking at the exhibition The Brutal Truth, which took this year’s top prize for international exhibitions from Beaux Arts magazine. (It’s too late for you lot, sorry; the exhibition’s down now.) TBT is a retrospective of the expatriate American artist Sturtevant’s [...]

20 years ago I had an Idea. Maybe someone who knows something about the field can tell me what is wrong with it in 20 seconds (including maybe someone else had the idea 40 years ago).
This thought was stimulated by reading Structural Anthropology a collection of essays by Claude Levi-Strauss. There are two questions. [...]

Through a series of stupidities, when I moved from Washington to Germany, I lost a fair number of books. Several hundred, I think, but it’s a little too sad to count them up. There was, and still may be, a list I made when packing.
An indulgent winter evening’s thought is which one I would most [...]

Upon Reading the First Ninth of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle
It is a Frolick, a Cornucopia of interesting things, a narrative of the discovery of the calculus, scientific feuds, dissection, Religious Dissent, changing fashions in art, the return of comedy to the English stage, computation, coinage, banking and much, much more. One of the Leading Characters, [...]

Photo from ?A History for Today? (Anne Frank House)

Read more… or Read more right here… »

They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life. He was a [...]

The catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean gave many of us reason to crack open the dictionary and reacquaint ourselves with the term ‘theodicy’. Crooked Timber’s Brian Weatherson, for example, saw in the catastrophe an opportunity to discuss the ‘problem of evil’ (i.e., given the manifest existence of evil in the world, is it not [...]

This spring, the German newspaper whose web site isn?t quite as bad as another?s began publishing a series of 50 Great Novels from the Twentieth Century. It?s an admirable project in many ways — not least a cover price of EUR 4.90 per hardback. Thirty-seven books have been published so far, and I?ve now read [...]

In comments to an earlier post on neonazi electoral gains in eastern Germany, I noted that Germany’s mainstream right wing Union parties normally respond to this sort of thing with a rightward lurch of their own. And indeed, they are right on schedule.

Read [...]

When it comes to golf, I’m normally firmly in the ‘good walk spoiled’ camp, but I tend to make an exception for the Ryder Cup, which is currently taking place in the US.
It’s still golf, of course, so the main activity is watching rich men with bad fashion sense hitting balls around, but the interest [...]

Perhaps the most damaging effect of 9/11 and all that has followed will be its role in making divided loyalties one of the most dangerous things a person can have. From the beginning, while the ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning, any effort to hold non-trivial positions about terrorism and Islam [...]