January 2011
6 posts
“This is the problem of Reverse Platonism, common to American neo-conservatism. Plato deduced from the idea of Truth that the perfect state would be run by philosophers, ensuring that power was allied to wisdom. Foreign Policy has simply done the reverse. Where Plato asked ‘who should be powerful?’, and answered ‘the wise’, Foreign Policy asks ‘who should be...
Best Big Lebowski explanation I’ve ever read. →
theduty:
nickdouglas:
I didn’t write that title, but I endorse it.
…seconded.
The New Inquiry: The Power to Choose →
thenewinquiry:
At long last, the full text of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address is once more free and available online. Read it, please.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men…
Quality vs. the Internet
“I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of...
