Newest Essays

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To What End Are We Living?- Instrumental Reason and the Problem of the Good Life in Modern Times
The Post-Postmodern Historical Jesus
dildos, bongs and all-you-can-eat sushi: the role of streets in the creation of social trust
What Do Our Action Movies Say About Us
Context, Development and a Smidgen of Wonder
Post-postmodern Politics - A Going Under
 There’s a telling scene in the documentary Food, Inc where industrially raised cows are getting E.coli due to the cramped and unsanitary conditions they live in, and because they're being fed a diet unnatural to their systems. In order to combat this, food writer Michael Pollan suggests that if the cows were only put out to pasture for five days (to be fed on grass, their real diet), the problem of E.coli would be self-correcting. It would go away. What does the industry do instead? It builds an enormous space-age looking factory where men in fully enclosed suits put all the meat into stainless steel kettles where it's treated with ammonia to remove the contamination. Forget about the condition of the cows or the final quality of the meat- the solution chosen is the one that will continue production unchecked so that outputs can continue to be maximized.
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Adam Gopnik writes: As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like. Still, a real, unchangeable difference does exist between what might be called storytelling truths and statement-making truths—between what makes credible, if sweeping, sense in a story and what's required for a close-knit metaphysical argument. Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative.
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When one typically thinks about a great city visited, or any city for that matter, what is it that comes to mind? Hold on. Before you start thinking too deeply at this early morning hour, perhaps we should begin with an even more foundational question. We should start by asking what exactly it is that defines a great city. Take out a pen and some scrap paper and consider this for a moment…I’ll wait.  
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Sylvester Stallone directs, co-writes and stars in The Expendables, set for release on August 18, 2010. The trailer starts with that stylized, deep pitched voiceover that comedians parody so often: “They... Are the World’s Greatest Mercenaries... The Only Life they’ve Ever Known... (blam blam blam!) is War... The Only Loyalty they’ve ever Had... is to Each Other...” It ends with a Metallica-esque power rock song, at high volume. In between there are bullets, explosions, military vehicles, muscles, knives, and bad guys getting shot to pieces by a bantering, wisecracking who’s who of action stars, past and present: Stallone (of course), Dolph Lungren, Jason Statham, Jet Li - even Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwartzenegger do cameos (Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme were both offered roles, but turned them down). Other high-testosterone presences in the film include the recently beefed up and tattooed Mickey Rourke, wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin and UFC fighter Terry Crews.
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Education is among the few hotly debated subjects where virtually all combatants are truly well meaning. It is also a subject that draws ire. Few subjects so vividly expose our values. “Education is not itself so much an idea or a subject matter as it is a theme to which the great ideas and the basic subject matters are relevant. It is one of the perennial practical problems which men cannot discuss without engaging in the deepest speculative considerations. It is a problem which carries discussion into and across a great many subject matters – the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; psychology, medicine, metaphysics, and theology;  ethics, politics, and economics. It is a problem which draws into focus many of the great ideas – virtue and truth, knowledge and opinion, art and science, desire, will, sense, memory, mind, habit; change and progress; family and state; man, nature, and God.”  -- Mortimer Adler  
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"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" - Frederich Neitzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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