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Innocence vs. experience
Pedro the Lion’s song “Penetration” begins Have you ever seen an idealist with gray hairs on his head? which reminds me of the passage in Emerson’s lecture “The Transcendentalist” where he says Talk...
View ArticleRad tot lit
"Children of the Left, Unite!" my essay about Tales for Little Rebels, an anthology of radical children's literature edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Phlip Nel, appears in the 11 January 2009 issue of...
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Notebook: The Golden Age of Piracy
"Bootylicious," my review of Peter T. Leeson's The Invisible Hook, appears in the 7 September 2009 issue of the New Yorker. As in the past, I'd like to offer on this blog some description of the...
View ArticleAgainst repressive antisentimentalism
Dear Mark, When you and I read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or this spring, in a group that met every morning for a week in the second-floor cafeteria of the Houston Street Whole Foods, we had many arguments...
View ArticleThe divine inhumanity of barbecue
Cain offered God vegetables, Abel offered meat, and God liked meat better. Byron was a sometime vegetarian, and in Byron’s play Cain, the hero scorns meat-eating with heretical, high-Romantic passion....
View ArticleDebtmageddon vs. the robot utopia
It seems likely to me that almost everything prescribed by politicians as a remedy for America’s economic doldrums is wrong. I’m not an economist, so my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of...
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Visiting Liberty Plaza
To spend one’s days and nights in a New York City park is expensive. At a minimum, one gives up running hot water, protection from rain and cold, convenient access to a bathroom, and most forms of...
View ArticleEmerson on Occupy Wall Street
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus,...
View ArticleStarring Justin Timberlake as the Labor Theory of Value
Over at the Paris Review Daily, I consider the Marxian principles in the new Andrew Niccol movie In Time.
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A retrospective glance
The New Yorker, as you may have heard, has redesigned its website, and is making all articles published since 2007 free, for the summer, in hopes of addicting you as a reader. Once you’re hooked,...
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