Le Sentier des Idées 25- 02- 21

Thorstein Veblen and the Myth of the Academic Outsider

SOURCE:The New Criterion
DATE: 2021-02-10

How to be a genius
I travelled the world and trawled the archive to unearth the hidden lessons from history’s most brilliant people

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2021-02-10

Work Sucks: On Anne Helen Petersen’s “Can’t Even”

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2021-02-10

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule’s Technocratic Despotism

SOURCE:The New Criterion
DATE: 2021-02-10

The insidious attacks on scientific truth»

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2021-02-10

The problem with prediction
Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will change how we think

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2021-02-10

Technosolutionism Isn’t the Fix
Whether a crisis of public health or public safety, is the best response increased surveillance?

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2021-02-10

Plato in Sicily
Plato travelled to the decadent strife-torn court of Syracuse three times, risking his life to create a philosopher-king

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2021-02-10

A Scientist’s Mind, a Poet’s Soul
On the unified cosmic vision of Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth century’s great naturalist-adventurer

SOURCE:The New Atlantis
DATE: 2021-02-10

The life and loves of Mary Wollstonecraft
Sylvana Tomaselli reveals how much the passionate, impulsive ‘mother of feminism’ achieved before her tragic death

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2021-02-10

The life and loves of Mary Wollstonecraft
Sylvana Tomaselli reveals how much the passionate, impulsive ‘mother of feminism’ achieved before her tragic death at the age of 38

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2021-01-17

What Attacks on Science Get Wrong
Science is an institutionalized set of knowledge practices, not a philosophical system.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2021-01-17

America, the Exceptional?

Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom

SOURCE:The New Criterion
DATE: 2021-01-03

The Harvard Supremacy
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 2020-12-11

How close is too close?
The neuroscience of peripersonal space explores how you create, defend or relax the buffer zone between you and the world

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2020-12-11

Trump’s Presidency May Be Over. ‘Trumpism’ Is Not.
Academics are grappling with what that means — even without Trump as head of state

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2020-12-11

Inventing the authority of a modern self
A review of Montaigne: Life without Law, by Pierre Manent.

SOURCE:The New Criterion
DATE: 2020-12-11

America, the Exceptional?
Is the idea of American exceptionalism even recognizable anymore?

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2020-12-10

What Attacks on Science Get Wrong
Science is an institutionalized set of knowledge practices, not a philosophical system.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2020-12-10

‘Wagner Was the Original Canceled Artist’
Alex Ross on the controversial composer and his own ‘ghost identity’ as an academic

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2020-11-14

Art After the Plague
How painters through the ages have responded to contagion, pestilence, and deadly epidemics

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 2020-11-01

Scholars Who Attack ‘Originalism’ Should Know What It Means
Historians and literature profs without real knowledge are weighing in on legal debates.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2020-11-01

On the rise and rise of neo-Stoicism

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 2020-11-01

Is Deep Thinking Incompatible With an Academic Career?
Intellectual life is impractical, at least when set against the narrow confines of academic life.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2020-10-28

The Great Unread: On William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist”

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2020-10-21

Where loneliness can lead For Hannah Arendt, it was the essence of totalitarianism... more »

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2020-10-21

The Death of Max Jacob

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 2020-10-21

Luc Sante Talks About New York in the 70s, Street Photography, and the Magic of eBay

SOURCE:GQ
DATE: 2020-10-07

Teach What You Love

A modest proposal for professors of literature

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 2020-09-21

Is it possible that Neanderthals had a spiritual life?

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2020-09-21

René Girard the last of the hedgehogs?

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2020-09-21

On tact in dark times

Far from a social luxury, tact becomes imperative when life is cheapened. We exercise it to show gentle respect for another

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2020-09-14

Bonfires of Reason Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 2020-09-14

The End of History and the Fast Man

Bidding farewell to America’s car culture — and its democratic virtues

SOURCE:The New Atlantis
DATE: 2020-09-07

Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever

SOURCE:GQ
DATE: 2020-09-07

Tawk of the Town
You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 2020-09-07

On Afropessimism

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2020-07-28

How Should One Live?
This is the question that tormented Søren Kierkegaard, perhaps the first great philosopher to process our modern world

SOURCE:The American Interest
DATE: 2020-07-28

The Flatterer and the Chatterer
The “Theophrastan character”....

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 2020-07-28

Nostalgia reimagined
Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works to

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2020-07-28

Victory in the Kitchen: The Life of Churchill’s Cook

SOURCE:London Review of Books
DATE: 2020-07-28

Flailing States
Pankaj Mishra on Anglo-America

SOURCE:London Review of Books
DATE: 2020-07-14

How time vanishes: the more we study it, the more protean it seems

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2020-07-01

Rise of the Absurdly Demanding Job Ad
Enough with peculiar obscurantism and unreasonable expectations

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2020-06-14

Feminism's First Think Tank

The very different women of the Radcliffe Institute’s inaugural class

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 2020-06-01

Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2020-05-28

An Apology for Buffalo Bill

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2020-05-01

The marvel of Mozart’s letters
Composers’ letters can make frustrating reading. But with Mozart, you get the whole personality — candid, perceptive, irresistibly alive and packed with filth

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2020-04-21

The Outrageous Optimism of Jean-Paul Sartre

SOURCE:Jacobin Mag
DATE: 2020-04-21

COVID and Community

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2020-04-07

Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2020-04-07

I’m Not Feeling Good at All
The perplexingly alienated women of recent American fiction

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 2020-04-01

To hell with hell: Bart Ehrman debunks the Christian belief in perpetual torment
His take on the afterlife should certainly be balm to the 58 per cent of Americans still living in fear of a literal hell

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2020-04-01

Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness
The Italian philosopher’s interventions are symptomatic of theory’s collapse into paranoia.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2020-03-28

What Freud Got Right
We might do a better job of living together if we believed that we are meant to do so

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2020-03-28

“behindology,” the art of deciphering the hidden meanings of things

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2020-03-18

What do we really mean by the ‘language’ of animals?
All pet owners recognise a bond of communication. But can animals be said to have a ‘grammar’, as Eva Meijer claims?

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2019-12-14

The Humanoid Stain
Art lessons from our cave-dwelling ancestors

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 2019-11-07

The happiness ruse
How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work; a never-to-be-attained goal which makes us miserable?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-11-07

Assuming that another person’s opinions are immune from criticism is not a marker of respect. It is, in fact, dehumanising

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-11-01

Here Come the Prose Police

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2019-10-28

the role of Christianity in shaping the Western mind.

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 2019-09-07

Why the ancient erotic poems of Sappho and Wallada bint al-Mustakfi are far more stimulating than modern pornography

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-09-07

What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 2019-09-07

Truth and Consequences
Untruth has been spreading with new ease and abandon, and often to undemocratic effect.

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2019-07-14

What’s the Use of Beauty?

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 2019-07-14

Why the power of cute is colonising our world

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-07-07

Market Values
Why are wealthy collectors getting fed up with abstract art?

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 2019-07-07

The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas
Academics pretend to be above cheap and trivial fads. We aren’t.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2019-07-07

Putting the Political Back in Politically Correct
Everyone is mad. Is anyone right?

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2019-06-14

Knowledge is crude
Far from being a touchstone of the truth, knowledge is a stone-age concept that harms our dealings with the modern world

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-06-07

How Social Media Imperils Scholarship
It plays on our vanity and reduces research to a popularity contest.

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 2019-06-07

Diese illegale Substanz wirkt schnell gegen Depressionen
This illegal substance quickly works against depression

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-04-22

Was the real Socrates more worldly and amorous than we knew?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-04-07

The Digital Humanities Debacle
Computational methods repeatedly come up short

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2019-04-01

How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2019-02-14

How the Right Learned to Loathe Higher Education

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2019-02-07

As Xenophon saw it
Brilliant leader, kind horseman and friend of Socrates: Xenophon’s writings inspire a humane, practical approach to life

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2019-01-21

De-Nazifying the “DSM”: On “Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna”

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2018-12-14

The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2018-11-21

The Crisis of Intimacy in the Age of Digital Connectivity

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 2018-10-17

Ode to Gray

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 2018-08-26

The Connectomic Revolution What the Insect Brain Can Tell Us About Ourselves

SOURCE:EDGE
DATE: 2018-08-25

Economic Theory Versus Big Data

SOURCE:EDGE
DATE: 2018-08-25

Nothing is more American than to proudly declare yourself outside the mainstream. And so we've become a herd of people busily declaring ourselves not part of the herd.

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2018-07-04

Why read Aristotle today?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2018-06-05

Is it really a Leonardo?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2018-05-29

Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle
Confusion is a common reaction to a 'movement' that's little more than floating balloons of jargon

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2018-05-29

Expose Thyself! On the Digitally Revealed Life

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2018-04-19

What is good science?
Demanding that a theory is falsifiable or observable, without any subtlety, will hold science back. We need madcap ideas

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2018-04-09

He Never Sat an Exam
A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things: The Life of Alexander von Humboldt

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2018-04-09

Short Cuts
How it’s become increasingly difficult to achieve distance from the past.

SOURCE:London Review of Books
DATE: 2018-03-30

The Time for Art Is Now

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 2018-03-25

The Joke’s Over
Academics are too scared to laugh.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 2018-03-22

Signifiers
Curate

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 2018-03-22

A history of alienation
In the postwar period it was understood to be the fundamental malaise of modern life. Why aren’t we ‘alienated’ any more?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 2018-03-22

Education: Low Social Benefits, High Social Costs?

SOURCE:Reason
DATE: 2018-03-22

The Mirage of Knowledge
the dangerous antipathy to expertise.

SOURCE:Harvard Magazine
DATE: 2018-03-13

The Privilege Predicament
has the promiscuous casting of blame enhanced the work of understanding?

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 2018-03-13