Since I wrote my brief broadside against Steven Pinker’s monumentally misguided New Republic essay “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians,” a slew of additional responses have come to my attention. Rhetorically, my reply was a proslepsis (among its many names), a technique by which one talks about something while pretending […]
“The Don Draper of Existentialism”
. Albert Camus is having a moment. He should have more of them and always. To be French, though, in these United States, since Lafayette, has always meant to be as recherche as the word; to be an existentialist, for a long time now, so passe (and so freaking French); and to be left, in […]
How We Lived On It (46) – “The Caging Of America”
. The temptation is to quote it all. This selection gives you an idea. From Adam Gopnik’s stunning New Yorker article on the sowing and reaping of American criminal justice. For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people […]