Archival Interview: Umberto Eco on Truth, Fiction, and the Holy Grail “It was a beautiful story. Too bad no one will find out about it.” “You surely don’t believe that you’re the only writer of stories in this world. Sooner or later, someone — a greater liar than Baudolino — will tell it.” — Umberto Eco, Baudolino In Memoriam | Umberto Eco: … Read more
Published on Feb 5, 2016 David Newheiser introduces his article ‘Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism’ Theory, Culture & Society, 0263276415619997, first published on January 13, 2016 Read the article abstract here http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/early/…
Turkish Academe Under Attack Turkish scholars describe a growing intolerance for dissent. February 12, 2016 By Elizabeth Redden In the early morning hours of Jan. 15, the antiterror police came to Yucel Demirer’s home. He was taken to police headquarters, where he shared a cell with fellow Kocaeli University professors who, like him, had signed … Read more
Nietzsche Lays Out His Philosophy of Education and a Still-Timely Critique of the Modern University (1872) Open Culture by Josh Jones In a recent entry in the New York Times‘ philosophy blog “The Stone,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle locate a “momentous turning point” in the history of philosophy: its institutionalization in the research university in … Read more
Prof. Özbudun is charged with supporting PKK due to some of her sharings online that are nothing to do with PKK. One of the posts is related to a poem from Can Yücel, a leftist poet [this of course reminds one that Erdoğan was once imprisoned for a poem he recited and he always used … Read more
What is the Good Life? Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, & Kant’s Ideas in 4 Animated Videos Open Culture by Josh Jones We all have some vision of what the good life should look like. Days filled with reading and strolls through museums, retirement to a tropical island, unlimited amounts of time for video games…. Whatever they may … Read more
Who hasn’t quoted Imagined Communities at some point in a social science career? Ben Anderson, author of Imagined Communities, 1936-2015 open Democracy News Analysis – by Anthony Barnett A great scholar has just died, this short salute allows those inspired by his work to add their appreciations. Anderson speaking at the National University of Ireland Galway, … Read more
Michel Foucault as an activist intellectual open Democracy News Analysis – by Engin Isin Foucault’s 1982 – 3 lectures presented his thoughts on the subject of parrhesia, or the truth-telling subject. He found himself confronting governments through speech acts in ways that we have yet to understand. Foucault portrait. Flickr/Thierry Ehrmann. Some rights reserved.Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was one of … Read more
14,000 drawings of the French Revolution posted online Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza Guillotines and numbing satire figure strongly in an archive of images from the French Revolution, made available by Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France Beautiful and Surprising Maps of the Worlds Within Books Slate Articles by Dan Kois What does the town … Read more
New book: Participatory Culture in a Networked Era by Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and me! apophenia In 2012, Henry Jenkins approached Mimi Ito and I with a crazy idea that he’d gotten from talking to the folks at Polity. Would we like to sit down and talk through our research and use that as the basis … Read more
Google’s audacious project that scanned millions of books has been declared legal The Next Web by Owen Williams Google Books, a project that involved scanning tens of millions of books to make them available online, was met with resistance from authors around the world. A group of authors sued Google in 2008 claiming that the project violated copyright and … Read more
Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus wins Nobel literature prize Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature Oct. 8 for works that the prize judges called “a monument to suffering and courage.” Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Prize in literature Mashable! Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for works that … Read more
The Martian and the Cult of Science Slate Articles by Rachel E. Gross Ridley Scott’s The Martian opens with an unsolvable problem: It’s 2030, and the crew of NASA’s Mars spaceship the Hermes has just left astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) stranded on Mars. Watney’s situation is not good. Utterly alone, wounded by spaceship debris, and … Read more
On the declining ebook reading experience kottke.org by Jason Kottke When reports came out last month about declining ebook sales, many reasons were offered up, from higher pricing to the resurgence of bookstores to more efficient distribution of paper books to increased competition from TV’s continued renaissance, Facebook, Snapchat, and an embarrassment of #longread riches. What … Read more