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Kitsch and Camp in the Age of Trump

February 21, 2018 by Rufus Hickok 1 Comment

In this strange era, in which the dominant intellectual pastime has become analyzing the moods and behaviors of the American President (not so different, one imagines, from life at Versailles in the mid-eighteenth century) an interesting question about Donald Trump seems, to me at least, to be whether his style is more Kitsch or Camp? I realize this concern puts me in  Continue Reading …

Academic Suffering and Mere Curiosity

November 28, 2017 by Rufus Hickok 15 Comments

In a recent essay, I mentioned that I work as a university custodian among academics and administrators who “look even more miserable than those of us maintaining the buildings.” Actually, I would go a bit further and say the cleaners typically seem to be much more cheerful than the faculty members whose offices we keep ship-shape. It’s a pattern I see repeated among my  Continue Reading …

Louis C.K., Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on How to Suffer and Be Happy

October 24, 2017 by Rufus Hickok 8 Comments

Why does happiness so often present itself as a problem? A tremendous amount of our cultural discourse now seems geared toward achieving happiness, realizing happiness, or consuming moments of happiness. A fully realized commerce in self-help books and medications offers to prop us up in our unending aspirations toward perpetual happiness. One would assume that life and  Continue Reading …

Don’t Know Much About History (but Should We?)

October 12, 2015 by Rufus Hickok 5 Comments

History is a nightmare from which a great many of us seem to have awakened. One is struck frequently by examples of our culture’s lack of historical memory, or at least by that lack on the part of many members of our society. In my own city, a politician was recently roasted for an inappropriate joke she made about Auschwitz over social media concerning the phallic nature of  Continue Reading …

What Can This Lost Generation Learn from the Last One?

June 23, 2015 by Rufus Hickok 10 Comments

In his 2010 book Ill Fares the Land, the late historian Tony Judt laments the fate of the “millennial” generation, burdened with debt, war, and vanishing opportunities beyond short-term desultory labor. Here, Judt makes a striking comparison- or striking enough that I jotted it down:  The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of  Continue Reading …

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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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