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Culture
Shame of the Universities, II : the Droit de Seigneur in America
There are scandals that fascinate but don’t educate. And then there are the other scandals, the ones that x-ray a social order, the ones that, […]
ON LAUREN ELKIN’S FLANEUSE AND THE URBAN MAPS WE CARRY IN OUR HEADS
At some point in 2001, before the Tower fell, I flew into Los Angeles from Austin in order to interview Carol Muske-Dukes, the poet […]
SHAME OF THE UNIVERSITIES
There’s been a lot of news about our elite universities lately. All of its been bad. Let’s do a rundown. Tufts On January 31, 2019, […]
Anna Burns’ Milkman and the role of the proper name in all histories, sacred or profane
Burns begins her novel with an utter spoiler of a sentence that pretty much states the case: The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to […]
Yesterday’s papers two: the heatwave in Paris and nightlife poetics
The heat wave here is broken. I got up this morning, went to the boulangerie on Rambuteau, and on the way back whistled, “We’re having […]
Yesterday’s Papers
“Who wants yesterday’s papers? Who wants yesterday’s girl?” I have always been a Beatles-over-the-Rolling-Stones type of old slag. This lyric represents the reason. How could […]
Where did capitalism come from?
“This institutional gadget, which became the dominant force in the economy—now justly described as a market economy—then gave rise to yet another, even more extreme […]
Whose posterity is it?
There’s a popular literary game, which consists of predicting which writers will “endure”. Whenever the waters of clickbait grow still and old, some webzine […]
Ontological bluffing: a protest
There is a form of ontological bidding that gets to something in me, some resident respect for the old fashioned, Aristotelian rules of logic. […]
CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND THE ETHOS OF INTEGRITY
Throughout the 19th and 20th century, one stumbles upon the lefthand heirs of Burke – Red Tories, as Orwell called them. Orwell’s instincts, at least, […]
Public Opinion – a brief, gnostic history
P.S. is a 42-year-old man who has been affected by paranoid schizophrenia since the age of 20. At the onset of his psychosis, he was […]
The hatred of paradise
The Dialectic of the Enlightenment was the first in a series of post-war books that variously attacked the Cold War consensus on both sides. I’d […]
Leonardo Sciascia: the underground man from Sicily
1 Leonardo Sciascia has never gained a major foothold in the mind of the Anglophone world. Perhaps one could say he has a pigeonhole. He […]
What we can do about impunity
In Paris two months ago a feminist group went about and affixed stickers with female names to streets. This was more than about those streets […]
War Machine reflections
My father never killed anyone. He never, for example, burned the skin off a child. He never shot anyone in the stomach. He never shot […]
Buridan’s Internet
Buridan’s ass would doubtless have hated the internet. The same old blues, he’d think, multiplied infinitely. Or perhaps, and this is the bet every […]
Demystifying Pareto optimization: neoliberalism notes 4
“His belief in man’s freedom of thought and action, whether in the marketplace, in the press or in the university lecture halls remained unshaken till […]
On an image in W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo: neoliberalism notes 3
One of Foucault’s most ingenious lightning strokes comes at the beginning of the essay with a name like a telegram from the Hotel Abyss: Nietzsche, […]
The Hunter Plot: from Fenimore Cooper to the Business School
Because it seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one […]
Neoliberalism notes 2: the ideological hole
We – denizens trapped in this world – are clearly in an alt-right moment. Just this week: Andrew Scheer, the conservative party candidate for […]
Notes on Neoliberalism 1
Ellen M. Wood’s “The Retreat from Class” , published in 1983, is uncannily predictive of the course of neo-liberalism. Though she is pretty highhanded with […]
The Killing Joke: Brexit
Oliver’s army is here to stay Oliver’s army are on their way And I would rather be anywhere else But here today – Elvis Costello Heroic […]
MYTHS: the cereal box
Breakfast cereal is an emblem of the industrialized food system. If the system had a totem, surely the faces of Captain Crunch, Tony the Tiger, […]
On the Sackler Watch
Fans of justice, who’ve been given a battering over the last, say, 30 years, got a small peek into a better world this week […]
Philosopher, backchannel man, spy: the case of Alexandre Kojève -From the November Willett’s
Jeff Love, The Black Circle: a life of Alexandre Kojeve, Columbia University Press, 2018 See the recent article about Kojève here in the […]
On Liking or Disliking Books
Years ago, I was a book reviewer. I am not exaggerating when I say I’ve reviewed more than 500 books – mostly in small reviews […]
THE PHILOSOPHICAL BUFFOON
In the Hippias Minor, Socrates challenges Hippias… a vain sophist, over the matter of who is the better man: Achilles or Odysseus. Hippias holds that […]
On the character’s resistance to the author: a note on Wilde’s The Decay of Lying
I was talking with a friend the other day and she told me that she couldn’t stand Zola. Zola, she said, is boring. I’m not […]
There are many ways to skin a plutocrat
The billionaires convoked their version of a kangaroo court – call it the country club court – and pronounced sentence upon Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax […]
The social utility of fatcats 2: on inherited wealth
I received interesting responses to my opinion piece last week about the social function of fat cats. One of the responses, from a libertarian-leaning soul, […]
Social utility of fat cats: the use and limits of wealth
We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, I see two functions: administration and investment. The […]
Novels and the microfoundations of economics
V.S. Pritchett once wrote about the novelist’s knack of “showing how people live in one another’s lives.” This is not only a concise way of […]
Internautica January 9, 2019
Rachel Cusk’s meditations on the road near her house and the intermitten cardrivers upon it is really in the English mode. George Orwell, in one […]
Apollinaire: the lyric and the adventure
In 1847, Walt Whitman, scribbling in his notebooks, put down a proposition that runs, manifesto like, through a considerable portion of the poetry written […]
Apollinaire, the streets, and time: non-Storyform version
I threw into the noble fire With human hands made of that pyre That void socketed dead man beneath, That past, and worshipped within me […]
Apollinaire, the streets, and time
I threw into the noble fire With human hands made of that pyre That void socketed dead man beneath, That past, and worshipped within me […]
Mismatch Politics: Macron’s strategy
In politics, hate is not enough.
Our economic emergency – and Macron’s
In the state of economic emergency, proclaimed last night by our fearless leader, we look for comedy where we can find it. I found it […]
From the Phrygian cap to the 4 Iron
I can never quite believe what I know to be true: that the so called “liberal-left” press – using liberal in the American sense – […]
The murderers are coming! Macron, the paper kitty
Last night we went out and watched them board up the luxury shops. It was at once comic and infuriating. Since Macron has shifted from […]
Macron in Candyland
Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it As was obvious from the beginning, Macron is unsuited, temperamentally and intellectually, to be the president […]
Internautica: Hoaxers, Philip Johnson and the building of turds, Always Florida
There are practical jokes, there are heteronyms, there are the people with axes to grind, there are hoaxers. Louis Menand’s review of Christopher L. Miller’s […]
Fin de régime
Macron’s first instinct, after the uprising Saturday, was to go around getting photographed shaking hands with the cops. He of course cold shouldered anybody […]
A prick in the prick system: on Weinstein, Epstein and the state of American Justice
When O. was president, I often wrote bitterly critical things about what his administration was doing and what was happening in America. But to use […]
Poke their eyes out
You have to poke out the eyes of painters like you do with songbirds, to make them sing better. – Picasso The Beaubourg advertises its […]
The New York Times Troll page
Compare these two incidents. 1. According to the Ferguson report issued by the Justice Department in 2015, this happened: “In the summer of 2012, a […]
For a democratic, rather than autocratic, Senate
I have long been an advocate of radically reforming the senate by making it a trans-state office. Every ten million people should elect a senator […]
Internautica, week of November 12
Internautica for the week of November – Invasive species. I’m fascinating with the whole idea, the whole military reference, naturalized. My next novel concerns a […]
Apollinaire’s Poem “Tree”
Apollinaire died from the Spanish flu on November 8, 1918. I’ve been meaning to do a series on Apollinaire’s Paris. In the meantime, a translation […]
The geneology of “the worse, the better”
The famous phrase, “the worse the better”, is often attributed to Lenin. Supposedly, this is Lenin’s addition to the black book of political strategy, […]
on (re) reading the classics
Calvino begins his essay, Why read the Classics, by defining them in terms of a characteristic phrase: “I am re-reading x” The classics are […]
internautica for the week of Nov. 3
Harvard is always careful to filter out murderers among its students. We all remember the ghosts of the Puritans who founded Harvard howling with glee […]
When American Conservatives met Russian Nationalists: a love story from the Cold War (magazine version)
The two dominant factions among the country clubbers who lord it over the morlocks in the United States of Dreamland consist, on the one hand, of a rightwing group who spend a lot of time producing and decrying fake news, and a center-right group of Eloi who have produced a fake consensus history and spend a lot of time contrasting the present barbarians with the beautiful normality of once upon a time.The murder of 11 mostly elderly Jews in Pittsburgh has produced a lot of articles about how a
When American conservatism met Russian Nationalism: a love story from the Cold War
The two dominant factions among the country clubbers who lord it over the morlocks in the United States of Dreamland consist, on the one hand, […]
Internautica October 29
I have given much thought, in my life, to a certain intellectual history that characterizes the stages from the early modern age until now in […]
On the metamorphosis of Gyges: three stories about invisibility
In the first chapter of Marc Shell’s Economics of Literature, “The Ring of Gyges”, he relates two stories about the King of Lydia, Gyges. […]
On the decline of storytelling (magazine format)
1. As I went out one evening – not really just one evening, but a dateable dusk, with my son, Adam, here in […]
On the Decline of Storytelling
1. As I went out one evening – not really just one evening, but a dateable dusk, with my son, Adam, here in Paris, […]
Internautica October 21
Internautica Here are the reads for the upcoming week: For those who’ve forgotten: We’ve been at war in Afghanistan for 17 years. Our adolescent […]
Internautica October 14
Here are the reads for the upcoming week: Rachel Z Arndt pins down linguistic and attitudinal similarities between Go Dog Go and Malone Dies. The […]
Patience and the Restless Sleeper
There’s a thing about living in France that always amazes some outward suburban zone of my American brain: I go into the store, I get checked out by the cashier, I pull out my credit card, I put it in the little credit card machine, and a word appears on the screen: Patientez.
Be patient. In the United States, when dealing with machines, the signs and recordings are rarely rooted in such a quasi-moral, such a Ciceronian admonition. Rather, they tell you that they are busy processing your informa
Be patient. In the United States, when dealing with machines, the signs and recordings are rarely rooted in such a quasi-moral, such a Ciceronian admonition. Rather, they tell you that they are busy processing your informa
Saudis and their American friends
If I went to sleep in 2002 and woke up yesterday and read Tom Friedman’s non-apology for kissing the ass of Saudi Arabia’s young dictator […]
Internautica
Willett’s will compile, every Monday, a list of likely links for our readers. We’ll add to it all through the week. Here are the reads […]
What Democrats can learn from the Abe Fortas Case
Roger Gathmann Mother Jones, a magazine that has taken up the mantra of tut-tutting neoliberalism and run with it, has published an article that claims that it is a “liberal fantasy” to think of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh. The writer of the piece is their correspondent for covering the court, Stephanie Mencimer, so presumably she knows what she is talking about. This is her “wake up to the coffee” graf:It’s never going to happen. If the Democrats can’t stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate
Carswell: Even if he is mediocre…
THE SECOND IN OUR SERIES OF SUPREME COURT REJECTSOn December 5, 1970, the New Yorker published one of its then typical uberlong pieces, entitled Decision, by Richard Harris, under the Annals of Politics rubric. The article explores every nook and cranny of the dealing that went into the rejection of Nixon’s nomination of a Florida judge, G. Harrold, Carswell, for the Supreme Court post vacated by Abe Fortas. Harris later made the piece into a book entitled Decision. It was reviewed by William
The politics of misogyny
Who will guard us from the guardians? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – this is a question posed by a satirist, Juvenal. It is funny, really: you would imagine that the question would first turn up in Plato or Aristotle, reach its canonical form there – that great rounded form of the thing finally said, as though the whole ocean of discourse had washed over it and worn away every unnecessary edge. But it does not crop up there, nor in Cicero, but in a poem directed against women. “I know the ad
Outside agitators
One of the old key phrases in American politics was “outside agitator”.
The bubble yesterday, the bubble today, the bubble tomorrow
the bubble machine is still humming