Latest posts
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The King James Bible as English Literature
Read these words aloud: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Eleven words, ten of them of one syllable, the eleventh borrowed for an…
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Banned and Burned: The Classics That Scandalized Their Age
In January 1857, a public prosecutor named Ernest Pinard stood before a Paris court and accused a novel of an offense against public morals and religion.…
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Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’: Dare to Know
In December 1783, a Berlin clergyman named Johann Friedrich Zöllner published an essay arguing that couples should be married in church, and dropped into…
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The Communist Manifesto: Reading Marx Without the Caricature
Few documents have been more thoroughly read about and less thoroughly read than the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the slim pamphlet Karl Marx and…
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Thoreau’s Walden: The Case for Living Deliberately
On the Fourth of July, 1845 — Independence Day, and Thoreau chose the date on purpose — a Harvard-educated handyman and sometime schoolteacher moved into…
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Plato’s Symposium: What the Greeks Knew About Love
Philosophy does not begin in the classroom. In Plato’s hands it erupts in a lateral space, between goblets and speeches, between the drunkenness of bodies…
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Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations: Stoicism for a Chaotic World
The book we call the Meditations has no title. Marcus Aurelius gave it none, because he never imagined anyone would read it. The Greek heading that has…
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The Hammer and the Fire: How the Witch Hunts Happened
Between roughly 1450 and 1750, somewhere on the order of forty to sixty thousand people in Europe and its colonies were executed for the crime of…
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Gatekeepers of Fascism: How Authoritarianism Gets Normalized
Authoritarian regimes are not, in the modern era, usually built by authoritarians. They are built by the people who were supposed to stop them. This is…
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The Art of Rhetoric: How to Win an Argument the Classical Way
Watch any televised debate to its final seconds and you will see a curious thing: a candidate who has been thoroughly refuted, whose figures were wrong…