A Point of View: In defence of obscure words

We chase “fast culture” at our peril – unusual words and difficult art are good for us, says Will Self. We are living in a risk-averse culture – there’s no doubt about that. But the risk that people seem most reluctant taking is not a physical but a mental one: just as the concrete in [...]

David Collard on Exorcism by Eugene O’Neill

There’s a moment to savour in the 1930 Marx Brothers comedy Animal Crackers when Groucho flings woo at two wealthy women while wishing he could tell us what he really thinks of them. ‘Pardon me while I have a strange interlude,’ he says, stepping out of the scene to deliver a solemn monologue in a [...]

And the Winner Isn’t…

The Pulitzer board couldn’t decide on a fiction winner, so readers, writers and booksellers are losers. WHAT goes on during a deliberation is a private matter for the jurors alone; the rest of us are privy only to the verdict. That holds true for book awards as well as murder cases. So when the Pulitzer [...]

Marx at 193

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of [...]

Proust and His Mother

There are texts that seem to require a certain craziness of us, a mismeasure of response to match the extravagance of their expression. But can a mismeasure be a match? All we know is that we don’t want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be [...]

The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Fiction

Stories stimulate the brain. Metaphors like “He had leathery hands” rouse the sensory cortex. Amid the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens [...]

One door closes | The University of Chicago Magazine

“Are you a member of the Communist Party?” George Anastaplo, AB’48, JD’51, PhD’64, refused to answer that question, a refusal that shaped his life. Justice Hugo Black once called George Anastaplo, AB’48, JD’51, PhD’64, “too stubborn for his own good.” Sixty-some years later, Anastaplo sits in a basement room in the Gleacher Center, in downtown [...]

Odysseus Lies Here?

As the mystery of the exact location of Ithaca in Homer’s epic endures, there might be some inspiration for America today. FOR a nation like ours that is seeking its way home from 10 years of war, maybe there’s a dash of inspiration in the oldest tale of homecoming ever — “The Odyssey” — and [...]

Eric Kandel’s Visions

In 590 BC, to protect her besieged city of Bethulia, the alluring Jewish widow Judith drank with and seduced the attacking Assyrian general Holofernes. When he fell into a drunken, sated heap, she decapitated him with his own sword and displayed his head as trophy, rallying her fellow citizens to rout the Babylonians. So the [...]

500 New Fairytales Discovered in Germany

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian [...]

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