Absence of Mind

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)...

13 epigrams

These were published many years ago, in an obscure pamphlet issued by Robert L. Barth; then I set them aside and forgot them. The only epigr...

Singermann

My essay on Myron Brinig’s 1929 novel Singermann is up this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily . If the novel is ever reprinted, as it should b...

Hitchens diagnosed with cancer

Christopher Hitchens has released a terse, 37-word statement that he is beginning to receive chemotherapy for cancer of the esophagus. He s...

Spatial form and electronic texts

I’ll say this for the Kindle. It is forcing me to rethink my deepest convictions about literary form. Over at the New Republic , Rochelle Gu...

Why Kindle won’t replace the codex

In the June issue of The American , the economists Richard Swedberg and Thorbjørn Knudsen develop and extend the theories of Joseph A. Schu...

Stealing Home

Sports build character, Joseph C. Phillips writes in a column ahead of Father’s Day, but character is not built merely by picking up a ball...