Guest post by Mikhail Epstein My book, The Phoenix of Philosophy, is about philosophy at one of its most dramatic historical moments, at the boundary of two epochs: the formation of the ideocratic Soviet state—and its destruction. What is philosophy? There is no simple and universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. According to A. N. Whitehead, “the safest… Read More »
Guest post by Mark Steven Karl Marx was born in Prussia 203 years ago today and his writing and thinking are as crucial now, during the year of a global pandemic, as ever before. In a frequently quoted sentence written in the spring of 1845, Marx issued what reads as a statement of intent. “The philosophers,” he claimed, “have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is… Read More »
Guest post by Hadas Elber-Aviram For over a century and a half, London has remained the foremost city of urban fantasy. No city in the history of Anglophone fantasy literature has approached its ubiquity. As John Clute points out, even New York is ‘a fairly distant second’. This unrivalled predominance of London begs the question… Read More »
Guest post by Mikko Tuhkanen A dual orientation in Leo Bersani’s thought never fails to make me tremble, for in it I think I recognize something indisputably true. On the one hand, Bersani repeatedly attends to the unavoidability of aggression in our encounters with the world: we are inhabited, he suggests,by an “intractable,” because constitutive, hatred of otherness. On the other, all such murderous impulses are supplemented by the logic of what Bersani, echoing Charles Baudelaire, calls “correspondence of… Read More »
From government briefings to quirky “human interest” stories and double-blind Pub Med studies, narrative in all its multifarious forms is what we resort to, promising in various measure, consolation and comprehension. But we rarely ask why. Why we are addicted to narrative in the first place. Why our minds work this way.
The Haitian diaspora today, in my view, is very big and complex. You now have a lot of Haitian-born millennials who are adding another very important layer to the conversation. Some of them are in media, and what is highlighted about them is not even that they’re Haitian. They’re just out there excelling and doing their thing.
Having recently been alerted by my daughter via WhatsApp to David Wilcock’s The Synchronicity Key, blow me down if I didn’t experience my very own synchronistic event. In my initial blog, I had referred to myself as ‘something of an undercover agent investigating the writings of fellow African, Ben Okri’, the thrilling upshot of which… Read More »
Guest post by Chris Gavaler and Leigh Ann Beavers The below is an excerpt from Creating Comics, part of Bloomsbury’s series of Writers’ Guides and Anthologies. Begin with story events and let them guide page arrangement. When an artist receives a script from a collaborating writer, the process emphasizes story. Standard scripts divide page content… Read More »
