The New York Times’ Room For Debate features the following question today: Several Academy Award contenders like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle” glorify white-collar criminals and scammers, and many reality TV shows embrace the wealthy, too. A new series, “#RichKids of Beverly Hills,” is the latest example of our enthusiasm for “oglingContinue reading “Ogling the Antics of the Rich and the Stockholm Syndrome”
Category Archives: Philosophy
The Conformist Non-Conformist
In yesterday’s post I had quoted W. H. Auden‘s review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories in responding to his acid assessment of a reductionist impulse in art criticism. Today, I quote him again, on a topic that is of similarly perennial interest, the problem of conformism as a hallmark of non-conformity:Continue reading “The Conformist Non-Conformist”
The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses
In his review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories W. H. Auden wrote, Polar opposites as in appearance they look, the two literary doctrines of Naturalism and Art-for-Art’s-Sake, as propounded by Zola and Mallarmé, are really both expressions of the same megalomania. The aesthete is, at least, frank aboutContinue reading “The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses”
Prohibitionists and Their Impoverished Sense of Human Motivation
A few days ago, I wrote a post here on David Brooks’ inane ‘Weed: Been There, Done That‘ Op-Ed. Looking back on it now, what strikes me as most galling about Brooks’ post and other pro-prohibition sentiments that I’ve heard expressed in the past is the shriveled, impoverished, reductive view they have of human character.Continue reading “Prohibitionists and Their Impoverished Sense of Human Motivation”
Game of Thrones AKA The Widow’s Revenge
I quite enjoy HBO’s Game of Thrones and after accounting for all the sex and violence have often wondered why I find it so entertaining; I’m not inclined toward the fantasy genre under normal circumstances and do not think I had read any of its productions before Game of Thrones. (That has changed; I haveContinue reading “Game of Thrones AKA The Widow’s Revenge”
Bert Williams and the (Funny) Sadness of Clowns
WC Fields described his fellow Ziegfield Follies mate Bert Williams–‘one of the pre-eminent entertainers of the Vaudeville era and one of the most popular comedians for all audiences of his time…the best-selling black recording artist before 1920′–as ‘the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.’ Williams certainly made no secretContinue reading “Bert Williams and the (Funny) Sadness of Clowns”
Sports, the Distraction from the ‘Main Game’
Sometime ago, I received an email from an Australian friend of mine, who, among other things, wrote: Been thinking about how you and I love sport, how it really means something to us, how we cheer for our teams and are gutted when they lose. Yet we all know that sport (particularly non-participatory sport) isContinue reading “Sports, the Distraction from the ‘Main Game’”
The Terror of the Formerly Utterly Incomprehensible
Yesterday’s post detailing my rough introduction to calculus in high school reminded me of another encounter with a forbiddingly formidable mathematical entity, one that in later times served as an acute reminder of how even the utterly incomprehensible can come to acquire an air of familiarity. One reason for the rough ride I experienced inContinue reading “The Terror of the Formerly Utterly Incomprehensible”
The Abiding ‘Mystery’ of Calculus
I first encountered calculus in the eleventh grade. A mysterious symbol had made an appearance in my physics text–in the section on dynamics–as we studied displacement, velocity and acceleration. What was this ds/dt thing anyway? I had, at that point in time, never studied calculus of any variety; to suddenly encounter a derivative was toContinue reading “The Abiding ‘Mystery’ of Calculus”
The Year That Was, Here, On This Blog
The formal two-year anniversary of this blog was sometime back in November; as I was traveling then I couldn’t put up a commemorative post; this year-end dispatch will have to do as substitute marker for that occasion. 2013 was a busy year for blogging here, though I blogged on fewer occasions than I did inContinue reading “The Year That Was, Here, On This Blog”
Samir Chopra 