November 24, 2014
Metafascistical: On Christianity and Marxism
The gospel of radical equality: Whether it’s the community of the Faithful or the united workers of the world, Christianity or Marxism, this is a key selling-point. All […]
October 19, 2014
The iPhone Considered as a Work of Art
Is my iPhone a 21st century work of art? The exquisite touch of realism in the faint shadows under the icons at the bottom: The sleek, Brancusi-like sleekness of line […]
April 16, 2014
Magical Mystery Tour: Science as the New Authority
In Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” passage from The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor’s plan to “correct” the work of God (in a sense, to establish the Church) was based on […]
January 29, 2014
“Who are the modern heirs of James Joyce?”
The New York Times Book Review has instituted a new feature recently, in which they pose a question to a pair of writer-critics. Generally the answers are constrained by the […]
January 4, 2014
Esoteric and Exoteric: On Dickinson and Shakespeare
When I go back into my own archives—old floppy disks, ancient dot-matrix printouts off an Apple II GS—I find that my earliest poetry (written in my mid-teens) falls into two […]
December 17, 2013
In Praise of Agnosis
Entertain, for a moment, the possibility that reason evolved to facilitate the use of tools. If you take this point as a given—and I cannot “prove” to you that this […]
December 15, 2013
Do Animals Suffer?
Do animals experience pain? Do animals suffer? With human neuroscience still in its infancy as a discipline, animal neuroscience is even farther behind. I am usually reluctant to loudthink about either […]
December 14, 2013
The Brains of Animals
The radiologist in me had his interest piqued recently by a documentary that flashed an orca’s brain MRI (Blackfish). I started looking at every image and article Google Scholar could […]
December 12, 2013
The Future of an Identity
Even the bitterest hater of religion would concede it is exceedingly unlikely to vanish–not least because antireligious ideologues end up behaving like a religious community, with group-forming behavior (and group […]
November 29, 2013
About the “Singularity”
To decide whether Kurzweil’s idea of the Singularity is “true” or an “accurate” depiction of our future is to mistake the nature of prophecy. Imagine someone in 1914 predicting the […]
November 4, 2013
Rimbaud the Prodigy
We are used to mathematical prodigies—a Ramanujan, a Pascal, an Evariste Gaulois—leaping to some early, complete insight closed off to the merely talented or well-practiced. Musical prodigies, too, are well-documented; […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]