Conservatives and Porn: Surprise, Surprise.

From New Scientist (makes me wonder what happened to the old scientist):  “When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,” says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be [...]

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Suicide Squad

“A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses,” a wag once observed. Well, when it comes to dysfunction, the Wittgensteins of Vienna could give the Oedipuses a run for their money. The tyrannical family patriarch was Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), a steel, banking and arms magnate. He and his timorous wife, Leopoldine, brought nine children into the [...]

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Re-Branding Humanities?

An interesting article from the NY Times: One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic [...]

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Root Of All Evil II.

Following Michael’s suggestion (or my interpretation of his comment as a suggestion), I am titling this post appropriately. I have no idea what is up with Graham Harman’s late cat fight with yours truly, but it’s easy to see why I can’t stop going there again and again – it’s so easy and so effortless, [...]

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Root Of All Evil? (Video)

Richard Dawkins scares us with a cool video (and a soft British accent saying things like “There are people out there trying to kill you and me…”) – the question mark in the title of the program is, of course, a kind of gesturing, since we all know what Dawkins thinks about religion, therefore I [...]

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Philosophical Conversions.

I wonder if someone already wrote a book about it, but it would be nice to collect all the stories of philosophical conversions into one nice reference guide. I am thinking about examples like Rousseau’s realization that arts and sciences corrupt morals that came to him on the way to Vincennes in 1749 while he [...]

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“I Must Break You” (Updated)

[I promise, this is the last one on the matter, but I can't resist, simply can't - sorry it's a bit long, but not as long as the original exchange.] There’s rarely so much obvious hesistation followed by a resolution as in Alexei’s “What the hell, I’ll add my two cents here too” – but [...]

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La Jetée (1962) and Lost Anyone?

All of that confusing time-traveling and brain-exploding on Lost has made me think of this classic: it’s only about half an hour long, only still photographs and a voice-over – someone has to write about the connection, don’t you think?

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Internalize My Law!

I have been reading Terry Eagleton’s Holy Terror in the last couple of days, and I think I’m enjoying it, despite having a bit of an ambiguous initial encounter with Eagleton’s work earlier in life. It is full of great literary references and it makes for an enjoyable read when you recognize and understand the [...]

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Interesting New Book: Seeing Witness

Seeing Witness Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony Jane Blocker Table of Contents $25.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5477-2 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5476-5 Unearthing the meaning of witnessing in contemporary art and politics The act of bearing witness can reveal much, but what about the figure of the witness itself? As contemporary culture is increasingly dominated by [...]

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