ideas

Skepticism in Montaigne's Day

A surprising and interesting passage from Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question  and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which I’m reading now: There was only one exception to [Montaigne’s] “question everything” rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic Church, and that was that. This can come as a surprise to modern readers.

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"Tony Judt: A Final Victory"

By Jennifer Homans, Judt’s widow, and published in The New York Review of Books. Lovely and sad.

Aleksander Hemon: "National Subjects"

Another very good (and very dispiriting) non-fiction piece from the Bosnian-American writer, published in Guernica’s January 2012 issue.

"The Germans Dive Deeper"

<figure class=" sqs-block-image-figure intrinsic " style="max-width:332px;"> <div style="padding-bottom:150.60241699219%;" class=" image-block-wrapper has-aspect-ratio "> <img src="http://sschenkenberg.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/b338b-germans-dive-deeper.jpg" alt="germans-dive-deeper.jpg" /><img class="thumb-image" alt="germans-dive-deeper.jpg" /> </div> </figure> </div> Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century is an extraordinary 1,000-page book. It is immensely ambitious, rich in ideas and evidence of the German-speaking peoples’ world-changing achievements in music, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, geology, bioethics, archeology, art history, and on and on.

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Evgeny Morozov: "The Death of the Cyberflâneur"

An interesting piece published in today’s NYT: As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.” This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about.  Reminded me a bit of the “serendipity” exchanges from 2006.

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