I collect them and then I try to get them off my hands as quickly as I can, but they pile up.

Robot priests!  This piece makes me think of this, in several different ways: The humans are dead.  

A review of a book analyzing an important but under-appreciated conceptual distinction, developed by MI Finley, between a "slave society" and a "society with slaves."  The book is petty rich and comparative, the review is terse.  

I went looking for anyone else who loves Baldwin's THE DEVIL FINDS WORK and came across this. I think I read it when it came out (this piece, not Baldwin) but it nicely captures what is so great about the book. If you haven't read it, I recommend you do. To my mind it's the second great thing written in the United States about evil since 1950, the first being Arendt's EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM. And I'm not sure which is more profound. 

Nice little article on John Rawls and the "Rawlsian revolution."  Personally I'm still waiting for McKenzie Bok's book on the early Rawls and his theological roots to come out.  But this is fine.

"Does poetry have street cred?"  It's almost always a mistake to look for poetry's justification outside of actual, you know, poems, and this piece of prose is no outlier.  It starts by enumerating some of the (perceived) problems of contemporary poetry, and then . . . peters out in a series of banalities, such as "For me, the best poems are those in which the author avoids concealment and obfuscation, and the truth of that person, eccentric, vulnerable, and brilliant, bears itself out in a sound heretofore unheard. The best poems evince such authenticity in language, form, thought, and emotion that lead us to breathlessness and a lot of sweating, somehow changing the very air around us. It’s that moment when we stand mouths agape, hands above us in disbelief, at the courageousness, elegance, and purity of the utterance."  Admittedly, the task of writing an Introduction to a selection of other people's writing is a tough one.  Still, I don't stand, mouth agape or otherwise, at this; I just turn and walk away.