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
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
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?)
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?
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 …