Le Sentier des Idées 17- 06- 21

Authenticity is a sham
From monks to existentialists and hipsters, the search for a true self has been a centuries-long project. Should we give it up?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

The road from Rome
How cancel culture helps us to understand history
The fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t a tragedy for civilisation. It was a lucky break for humanity as a whole

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

Simone Weil, an antidote to the narcissism and conformity that characterize today’s “follower” syndrome

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

Can we escape the reductio ad tweetum?

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

Fanon Can’t Save You Now

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

Why a Columbia Neuroscientist Acknowledged Using Heroin

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions
The process has become an intrusive and morally presumptuous inquisition of an applicant’s soul.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

Jacques Derrida resists easy canonization in a new hagiography for the Left

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 01-01-1970

‘If We Don’t Adapt, We Will Wither Away’
how the university came to absorb all of culture — and what happens next.

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

The insidious attacks on scientific truth»

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

America, the Exceptional?

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

‘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: 01-01-1970

On the rise and rise of neo-Stoicism

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

The Death of Max Jacob

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

Is it possible that Neanderthals had a spiritual life?

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 01-01-1970

Teach What You Love

A modest proposal for professors of literature

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 01-01-1970

René Girard the last of the hedgehogs?

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 01-01-1970

On Afropessimism

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:London Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

Flailing States
Pankaj Mishra on Anglo-America

SOURCE:London Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

Feminism's First Think Tank

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

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 01-01-1970

An Apology for Buffalo Bill

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

The Outrageous Optimism of Jean-Paul Sartre

SOURCE:Jacobin Mag
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

COVID and Community

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

The Humanoid Stain
Art lessons from our cave-dwelling ancestors

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

Here Come the Prose Police

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

the role of Christianity in shaping the Western mind.

SOURCE:Literary REVIEW
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?

SOURCE:The Spectator
DATE: 01-01-1970

What’s the Use of Beauty?

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

Why the power of cute is colonising our world

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Baffler
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

The Digital Humanities Debacle
Computational methods repeatedly come up short

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

How the Right Learned to Loathe Higher Education

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

The Crisis of Intimacy in the Age of Digital Connectivity

SOURCE:Los Angeles Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

Ode to Gray

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:EDGE
DATE: 01-01-1970

Economic Theory Versus Big Data

SOURCE:EDGE
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

Why read Aristotle today?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

Is it really a Leonardo?

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

Expose Thyself! On the Digitally Revealed Life

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:Aeon Magazine
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:London Review of Books
DATE: 01-01-1970

The Time for Art Is Now

SOURCE:The Paris Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The Chronicle of Higher Education
DATE: 01-01-1970

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: 01-01-1970

Signifiers
Curate

SOURCE:The Hedgehog Review
DATE: 01-01-1970

Education: Low Social Benefits, High Social Costs?

SOURCE:Reason
DATE: 01-01-1970

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

SOURCE:The American Scolar
DATE: 01-01-1970