Plato’s Pop Culture Problem, and Ours

By ALEXANDER NEHAMAS Scratch the surface of any attack on the popular arts and you will find Plato’s criticisms of poetry. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on a case that may have the unusual result of establishing a philosophical link between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Plato. The case in question is the 2008 [...]

Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook

After losing his lower jaw to cancer, the film critic, who can’t eat, has written a cookbook that is an ode to the rice cooker. In those first few moments at the table, you try not to look at the empty place where his jaw used to be. You wonder how it feels to receive [...]

The Humanities for Love, Not Money

Continuing education programs across the country are finding students increasingly focused on the arts and humanities, whether for new careers or to re-explore great authors. WHEN the renowned educators Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins first decided to expand their Great Books course beyond the University of Chicago’s walls, they recruited some of Chicago’s [...]

Original Sin on Wall Street – The Atlantic

John C. Bogle is a huge fan of the Classics. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group mutual fund company, is one of the dozen or so “Wall Street Elders” (as a New York Times article called them) who have backed Paul Volcker’s proposal to re-regulate the financial industry, even as their younger peers have [...]

Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero

To many Asian-Americans, Charlie Chan is an offensive stereotype, a sort of yellow Uncle Tom. Chan, the hero of six detective novels by Earl Derr Biggers and 47 Hollywood movies between 1926 and 1949, not to mention a 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, is pudgy, slant-eyed and inscrutable, and he speaks in singsong fortune-cookie English, saying [...]

Orlando Does Not Fade: Revisiting Tilda Swinton’s legendary “nonperformance”

When Sally Potter’s free-wheeling Orlando came to the Sundance film festival in 1993, it didn’t exactly fit the profile of a festival breakout. It wasn’t a regional character drama like Gas Food Lodging or Mississippi Masala. It wasn’t handmade and idiosyncratic like sex, lies, and videotape or Slacker. It wasn’t a blood-spattered action picture, like [...]

Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession

Early in Elif Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book, The Possessed, she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with “the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative writing.’ ” The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft. “What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or [...]

The Art of the Sonnet

Poets writing in English have six centuries’ worth of forms at their disposal. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare and Milton made blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) the standard mode for narrative and dramatic verse, while in the eighteenth century Dryden and Pope preferred the urbane rhythms of the heroic couplet. Then there are the adopted forms, [...]

The Art of Slow Reading

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by [...]

Diane Ravitch on Being Wrong

“We are in the grips of a kind of national madness,” Diane Ravitch told me, “closing schools, firing teachers, shutting down public education.” What makes this statement interesting is that, for many years, Ravitch was a powerful voice within the national education reform movement she now rejects as faddish, empirically unfounded, and bad for America’s [...]

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