Just some links today.

Brief intro to Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Flights.  It has this nice suggestion about the book: “If Tokarczuk is a Penelope, weaving her fragmentary narratives together, she...

Just putting these out there.

I really like this piece, about why public stigmatization of many people who worked in the Trump administration is not only acceptable, and not only appropriate, but perhaps morally urgent.

The...

Just a few:

An interview with Jill Lepore, whose recent book If then is about the origins of “data science” and the emergence of “data” as a new ideology which implicitly, and sometimes more than implicitly, critiques and seeks to replace the humanistic study of the human.  It’s also about the way that corporate money, especially tech money, has flowed...

Just a few.  I've been busy, sorry about not dumping stuff on you guys!  I suppose you should be happy not to be dumped on, however.

An interview with Ariel Sabar about his new book Veritas, on the whole “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” scandal.  

I have long appreciated George Orwell’s little essay “Politics and the English language,” though I am not a fanatic about it, as some, mistakenly, are. What I admire about the piece is what I admire about a lot of Orwell’s writing: there is a willingness to see the fake pieties that we employ to hide ourselves from reality, and a fearlessness, on his part, at seeing through those pieties. A similar story can be told of Albert Camus at almost the same time, and also of Czeslaw Milosz just a few years after; some of Martha Gellhorn’s...

I have lots of small-essay ideas, but I'm dedicating what writing energy I have right now to my classes, and to a couple larger projects, so I'm not able to give it here.  Instead, these small links with a thought from me is all you get.  Sorry (probably it's better for you to be exposed to less of me anyway).  (Is anyone reading this at all?  Sometimes I wonder...Who'm I kidding, I wonder this all the time.)

It’s a list of...