Art & Literature
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Toward a Normie Progressive Politics
I'm getting a little self-conscious about my incessant references to Ezra Klein, but he is quite remarkable for having his finger on what I see as the critical issues. This week he had on Michelle Goldberg, a woman I respect as a sensible Progressive and like for her intellectual honesty and personal authenticity. But she's
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Max Scheler on What Poetry Does
For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie ], fulfil a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognisable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of
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The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I
I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live–as much
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Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness
[Ed. note: I posted this originally in 2018, but I was reminded of it by Will Arbery's play that I wrote recently about. Both are about challenging in interesting ways the more superficial presuppositions of the late modern cosmopolitan imaginary.] Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or
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Heroes of the Fourth Turning
I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a
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Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum
Ultimately the principle of division (that of the left hemisphere) and the principle of union (that of the right hemisphere) need to be unified: in Hegel’s terms, the thesis and antithesis must be enabled to achieve a synthesis on a higher level. Split-brain patients can tell us a little about this level from their experiences
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Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum
There’s a mesmerizing and ironic artifice to Dolly Parton—a sincere and relatable duality. She’s one of those icons in whom seemingly opposing forces naturally connect: poverty and folksiness against the power of enormous success, vulnerability and tenderness against effervescent self-assuredness, a story of honesty and heartache under an image so artfully plastic it seems to
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Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness
Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however,