Do You Have to be Rich to be a Philosopher?
“Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.” These were the last words of Socrates, as recorded in Phaedo, Plato’s famous dialogue.
Culture & Media
112 posts
Aesthetic Denialism and the Rise of Acadumbia: Yale, Bloom, English and How It All Went South
The Awakening of a Passion In the early 1990s, when I was in high school, I fell in love with literature and decided I wanted more. I attended a middle…
The Emperor’s New Outrage: Why Legacy Media Is in Trouble
New media—news and entertainment entities native to the Internet, whether companies or individuals—are gaining a share of customer attention and wallet at the expense of legacy media—newspapers, television stations and…
Is Battle Rap the Last True Bastion of Free Speech?
In a packed basement in the heart of Sheffield, northern England, two burly men—one wearing a hoodie, the other sporting a fitted New York Mets baseball cap at a jaunty…
Supposed Former Appropriation Junkie: Reinterpreting Alanis Morissette
Recently, while doing the dishes, I gazed upon a ratty, exhausted old sponge caked with debris—and was instantly reminded of those who have soaked up every bad idea that has…
Literature, Authenticity and Race
As Cathy Young observes in a recent essay, the media has not given J. D. Salinger a warm welcome into his centennial year. Two days before the celebrated author’s birthday, the Washington…
Art Activism: The Assault on Art from Within
I have recently become aware of an unsettling phenomenon at art exhibitions curated around themes of social activism. Although I find myself to a great extent on side with…
In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown’s Happy. Book Review.
Stoicism has got a bad rap lately. In the popular imagination, it is associated with reluctance—particularly male reluctance—to show vulnerability or talk frankly about emotions. The new APA guidelines on…
Should Journalism Speak Truth to Power?
If you teach journalism, as I have for several decades at a trio of US universities, you will hear your most engaged students gush one or both of the following…
The Jesuits: For God and Globalization
On 16th November 2018, a twenty-six-year-old American missionary called John Allen Chau was killed by an isolated tribe on the island of North Sentinel, part of the Indian island territories of Andaman…
Servile Oblivion and the End of Education
Liberal education is the individual assimilation of cultural memory: we recover the historical and metaphysical ground of our being by studying the accumulated riches of the past. This humanly essential…
The Creative Practitioner and Cultural Appropriation
There is, perhaps, no more important topic in the social sciences than the study of intercultural communication. Understanding between members of different cultures was always important, but it has never…
A Screenshot, a Meme and a “Transphobic” Tweet: How Game Journalists Hounded One Man Out of Work
Sean Halliday, a community manager for Good Old Games, was fired after he accidentally tweeted under a hashtag with sociopolitical connotations. Now he’s been hounded out of a second job…
How Games Journalism Lost Its Soul
In the first decades of the 2000s, when the violent video game debate was at its height, games journalism (aimed at an audience of avid gamers) was at the forefront…
Double-Edged Jewish Humor: The Jimmy Kimmel Show’s Chanukorn
Jewish humor is a deeply ambiguous phenomenon. Yes, it can be very funny. But the thing that makes it Jewish is the somber undertones that permeate it. Jews are trained…
Manchester City, Abraham Lincoln & True Sublime Heroism
Brazennose street in Manchester, an innocuous thoroughfare linking Albert Square and Deansgate, is home to a little known piece of Lancastrian history. There resides an unlikely but imposing four-meter-high bronze…
A Response to Portland State’s Vanguard’s Anonymous Letter.
Prof. Boghossian and co-authors’ reception of the letter. On November 9th, Vanguard, Portland State University’s student newspaper ran a very strange article written not, it claims, by students but by…
A Persian Popinjay. A Review of the Film Bohemian Rhapsody
Warning: contains spoilers. The Demands of the Narrative The film opens with a close-up of star Rami Malek’s eye, a circlet of pale blue-grey iris clearly visible around a wide…
