If you Google the phrase “movies with the word ‘love’ in the title,” you could spend an amazingly long time reading list after list of endless films. Hollywood knows that the word “love” is like pouring gasoline on your marketing campaign’s fire—it could go very badly, but it is going
The critics have weighed in: at the Boston Globe, at the Chronicle Review, even with a slideshow on Slate.com, and the consensus is that Peter Toohey’s Boredom: A Lively History is anything but boring! (You can imagine how it came to have such a subtitle from the “Book Bench” interview
The May 22 cover of the New York Times Book Review featured a photograph of Harold Bloom; the title of Editor Sam Tanenhaus’s essay: “An Uncommon Reader”, accompanied online by an interview at Bloom’s home in New York. As Tanenhaus writes of the new book, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature
We’ve got graduation on the mind here at Yale today. This morning, President Richard C. Levin and many other speakers addressed the crowd assembled on Yale’s Old Campus for the university’s 310th Commencement exercises, complete with mascot, Handsome Dan. Always an occasion to reflect on past experiences and new beginnings,
Elie Wiesel, the prolific writer and humanitarian, needs little introduction. For the last half-century, his activism and advocacy for human rights have given him unparallel notoriety—some even credit him with our present understanding of the term “Holocaust”—not to mention his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and the ubiquity of Night and
Yale University’s Terry Lectures began in 1905 with a grant from Dwight H. Terry. Intended to bridge ideas of religion with developing modern science and philosophy, the deed of gift declares that “the object of this foundation is not the promotion of scientific investigation and discovery, but rather the assimilation
Continuing with our look at architectural spaces as constructs of the human imagination, a new book, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms, by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, gives special insight into the ways in which Justice has publicly appeared and influenced our own democratic
The discussion heats up for Why Marx Was Right at Bensonian.org: Andrew Walker, contributor to Mere Orthodoxy, gets into the claim that “Marxism believes in an all-powerful state.” Andrew Walker Terry Eagleton insists that Marx’s understanding of the state has been misunderstood. Objecting to the claim that the state leads
Over on the "Why Marx Was Right" blog discussion at Bensonian.org, Albert Lee responds to Chapter 6 of Why Marx Was Right, which is Terry Eagleton's response to: "Marx was a materialist." Albert Lee In the wake of the latest financial crisis of
Today’s “Why Marx Was Right” blog discussion features an essay by Jake Meador on Chapter 5 of Terry Eagleton‘s Why Marx Was Right, addressing the claim: “Marxism reduces everything to economics.” Jake Meador One of the most common dismissals of Marx accuses him of historical reductionism. “Marx creates a caricature