I have a bit of a backlog here, but really what’s so important about being timely with these things? Who cares if many of these came out in the end of August…it’s been a busy semester. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Pavlov…
Literature
Journalism, Literature, Philosophy, Science
Wieseltier on Scientism
by Rafe Kinsey •
Leon Wieseltier offers a great sermon against scientism. The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special authority, it confers no authority at all, for…
Economics, Finance, Interesting Links, Literature
Links: Economics, Breaking Bad, the Moon, Entrepreneurship, Albert Murray, Etc.
by Rafe Kinsey •
Shockingly, it’s difficult to keep up a blog while finishing a Ph.D., designing a new course, and looking for jobs. I have some drafts of substantive posts that I hope to polish up and publish soon. For now, some more…
Literature, Movies
Reality Bites as the Source for Infinite Jest?
by Rafe Kinsey •
Robert Harrison’s recent Entitled Opinions episode about David Foster Wallace reminded me of an interesting coincidence I discovered last year.1 In 1994, two years before the publication of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest, the generation X cult classic…
Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy
A Sonnet for Morgenbesser: Dear Astrophil, Love Stella
by Rafe Kinsey •
Two summers ago, I sat in on a wonderful introductory poetry course taught by John Whittier-Ferguson. Among the poems we read was Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet Astrophil and Stella 63 (“O Grammar rules…”). In this sonnet sequence,1 Astrophil is less…
Education, Interesting Links, Literature, Technology
Interesting Articles: Humanities Make Money, The Purchase of Instagram, Kierkegaard, and More
by Rafe Kinsey •
UCLA English professor Robert Watson writes a very interesting article about the economics of higher education: Bottom Line Shows Humanities Really Do Make Money I have a good deal to say about the misleading arguments often made about the cost…
Interesting Links, Literature, Science, Sports
Interesting Articles: The Dickens/Dostoevsky Hoax, the Mars Rover, Jason Collins, Janet Malcolm, Einstein’s Hoagies
by Rafe Kinsey •
If you haven’t read Eric Naiman’s fascinating article about the hoax of Dostoevsky meeting Dickens yet, you should. (It’s a long but fun read; give yourself time to enjoy it.) A great New Yorker article on NASA’s Curiosity rover to…
Literature
Allusion and Undertones in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Rafe Kinsey •
I wrote in my introductory post that I am ambivalent about much of contemporary fiction. Well, it’s wonderful to come across as singular a counterexample as Mohsin Hamid’s beautiful novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This is the sort of work that…
Literature, Meta
Letters to the Living Dead
by Rafe Kinsey •
The eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s Herzog spends his days writing letters. Moses Herzog1 is writing to “everyone under the sun…to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own…