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- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
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* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
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* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
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* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
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* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
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* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
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Category Archives: English
Departments on the Defensive
From the New York Review: * Academic criticism can thus be regarded as an innovation of the 1920s, like the lie detector, water skiing, the timed traffic light, and the bread slicer. * the pitched battles over curriculum and methodology … Continue reading
Posted in English
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Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
Here are some highlights from this 2022 book by Katherine Rundell: * The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured … Continue reading
Posted in English
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Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals (2015)
Review: “In late 1980, an apparently minor dispute at Cambridge University became headline news. The question was whether or not the young lecturer Colin MacCabe – whose work was heavily influenced by recent developments in structuralist and post-structuralist theory – … Continue reading
Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States
Here are some highlights from this 2012 book by David Hackett Fischer: * When one compares these many accounts, one notices that the same language of description tends to occur. Karl Popper described New Zealanders as “decent, friendly and well-disposed.” … Continue reading
Posted in America, Australia, England, English, New Zealand
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Enlarging America: The Cultural Work of Jewish Literary Scholars, 1930-1990
Here are some highlights from this 1998 book by Susanne Klingenstein: * Harvard is the biggest thing in town…Harvard is an octopus sprawled all over Cambridge with tentacles reaching deep into Boston… Once you are inside…the Harvard world…is very small, … Continue reading
Posted in English, Jews, Susanne Klingenstein
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Paul Johnson’s A History Of The English People
In his prologue to the 1980 edition, Johnson wrote: * A third objection to this book is that, in its exclusive preoccupation with the English, or rather with the peoples who have occupied the land we call England, it presupposes … Continue reading
Posted in English
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Protecting the wisdom of the West (Classical Liberalism & Jewish Tradition)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Alexander_(professor) https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Liberalism-Jewish-Tradition-Alexander/dp/0765801531 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson https://www.telelib.com/authors/T/TennysonAlfred/verse/suppressedpoems/hersperides.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Trilling Bud: “Very many of the big names in American Literature have been Jewish for a generation now. Charles Feidelson, Leslie Feidler, Nina Baym, Sacvan Bercovitch, etc. Also during this generation (between 1960-2000), the study of … Continue reading
Watching The English By Kate Fox
Here are some highlights: Any discussion of English conversation, like any English conversation, must begin with The Weather. And in this spirit of observing traditional protocol, I shall, like every other writer on Englishness, quote Dr Johnson’s famous comment that … Continue reading
Posted in English
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Watching The English By Kate Fox
Here are some highlights: * ‘How’s the Englishness book going? What chapter are you working on?’ ‘The one about sex.’ ‘So, that’ll be twenty blank pages, then?’ THE KNEE-JERK HUMOUR RULE I’ve lost count of the number of times I … Continue reading
Why the Brits do political satire so well — and Americans can barely do it at all
Michael Hiltzik writes: To serve this end, American producers become obsessed with making their characters lovable. The idea is to give the audiences characters they’re comfortable welcoming into their homes week after week, year after year. So the rough edges … Continue reading