It’s a simple enough object: a pencil box that looks like a smartphone. The box’s lid looks like a smartphone screen decked out with app icons, the ones that all of us smartphone users are used to: the phone, the messages, the various entertainments, the calculator, and so on. Pencil boxes have been decorated andContinue reading “Of Children’s Pencil Boxes And Ersatz Smartphones”
Tag Archives: cynicism
Schopenhauer On Disillusioned Lovers
In On Human Nature: Essays Partly Posthumous in Ethics and Politics (1896:1957, Allen and Unwin, London, pp. 14), Schopenhauer writes Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass; but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection. Hence it is that if, as often happens, we make a mistake aboutContinue reading “Schopenhauer On Disillusioned Lovers”
Rust Cohle and Naked’s Johnny
As I watched Rust Cohle in True Detective, it occurred to me he reminded me–in some ways–of another character I had found memorable; Johnny in Mike Leigh‘s Naked, . Johnny doesn’t seem to have a quite as philosophically inflected take on life as Cohle, but his dialogue delivery makes his lines epics of rage and dryContinue reading “Rust Cohle and Naked’s Johnny”
Samir Chopra 