a goldfinch instant: Concord to India Haikus

Paul Friedrich’s a goldfinch instant is in the spirit of Basho – but it breathes with Henry David Thoreau as well. Haikus “from Concord to India” are embedded in a prose poem that will be of particular interest to readers familiar with Friedrich’s poetry as well as his work in anthropology and linguistics – and [...]

How to Live: a Life of Montaigne

Before he was famous, the essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne brushed shoulders with death on a bridle path, some time in 1569 or early 1570. He was 36 and he liked to ride to get away from his inherited and elected ­responsibilities: a chateau and estate in the ­Dordogne and a seat in the Bordeaux [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Dostoevsky murals in Moscow metro station called inappropriate

The Moscow Metro’s newly opened Dostoevskay station has stirred up a controversy. Are the murals too depressing? Age: 188, but dead. Appearance: Bearded, depressed, decomposed. Fyodor Dostoevsky created two of the great 19th-century novels: Crime and Punishment, in which a student murders two old women with an axe, and The Brothers Karamazov, in which a [...]

The Ahab Parallax

The Ahab Parallax: ‘Moby Dick’ and the Spill By RANDY KENNEDY Published: June 11, 2010 A specially outfitted ship ventures into deep ocean waters in search of oil, increasingly difficult to find. Lines of authority aboard the ship become tangled. Ambition outstrips ability. The unpredictable forces of nature rear up, and death and destruction follow [...]

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

Economist Amartya Sen speaks about Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS).  Over the past 20 years TMS has steadily increased in influence as more academics turn to this work (which Smith himself considered central to his philosophy, and which is often neglected in favor of Wealth of Nations). The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam [...]

Hard-boiled: Classics of American Crime Fiction

Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Nick Charles: these are our “hard-boiled” American detectives — heavy-drinking, no-nonsense loners with a soft spot for dames. Raymond Chandler criticized British murder mysteries for lack of realism, praising Dashiell Hammett for “giving murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”  [...]

Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

Professor Martha C. Nussbaum, has written a new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; in this short and powerful book, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the Law School at the University of Chicago makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all [...]

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