Tag Archives: Essays

Arts & Culture: Sisyphus Magazine – Spring 2023

Democracy Issue Cover

SISYPHUS MAGAZINE (SPRING 2023) – This issue explores the theories in society that subjectify truth, the influence of social media, philosophical pragmatism, the generational representations of societal ideals, the environmental impact of governmental and private sector choices, the factions of progressive arguments, and the evolution of Sisyphus. 

In modern society, it’s difficult to discern what’s real and what’s not in news media’s contemporary platforms and discussions.

Truth is difficult to define but having a correct theory or definition is not the problem. We all know many truths and untruths, without knowing what philosophers have said, and without knowing that many still disagree with each other. 

The Principles of Quantum Mechanics

by Jaime Woolery

 
Once lost, the laws might be derived again 
When necessary, or so you’ve been told. 
You’re half asleep in January sun. 
Just out of sight, someone starts bugging you 
And Steller’s jays. Green hills, blue weather, — noon 
To bring out Panpipes, but it’s too damn cold.

The Progressive Impasse

by Demian Entrekin

Why the progressive movement has stalled.

I. Nominal and Material Progressivism 

Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx believed in progress.

The question, therefore, is what do we mean by progress? How do we understand it? How does it operate? How does progress correspond with progressivism? These questions have become important because progressivism has encountered an internal impasse. It has become mired in internal conflict.

The Arts: Brick Literary Journal – Summer 2023

BRICK LITERARY JOURNAL (SUMMER 2023)

  • Omar El Akkad swims from Doha to Orgeon
  • Hanif Kureishi rediscovers his subject matter
  • Rahul Bhattacharya on the greatest cricket photo ever taken
  • Kaiama L. Glover translates Haiti’s revolutionary poet
  • Eleanor Wachtel interviews Percival Everett
  • Lorna Goodison leaves the dinner party

Perspectives: Harper’s Magazine – January 2023

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Harper’s Magazine – January 2023 Issue:

Truth Takes a Vacation

Trumpism and the American philosophical tradition

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country, Rorty considered the possibility that “the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments.”

Boomtown

A solar land rush in the West

A solar farm in the Mojave Desert. All photographs from Nevada by Balazs Gardi, October and November 2022, for Harper’s Magazine 

Perspectives: Harper’s Magazine – December 2022

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Harper’s Magazine, December 2022 – Should we be Rooting for the Apocalypse? Rachel Kushner on Timothée Chalamet’s Cannibal Turn Sasha Frere-Jones Searches for Perfect Sound A Christmas Story by Kate DiCamillo And More.

Apocalypse Nowish

The sense of an ending

READINGS

You Talkin’ to Me?

by Meghan O’Gieblyn

Martha Stewart Living

by Martha StewartChelsea Handler

His Folk Nation

by Darryl Pinckney

No Times Like the Present

A Forest of Berlin

by Brenda Coultas

Previews: The Atlantic Magazine – November 2022

The Atlantic Magazine – November 2022 Issue:

The empty promise of the Sixth Amendment, Siegfried & Roy’s rise and fall, a Guggenheim scapegoat, and independence for Puerto Rico. Plus stopping election deniers, Atlanta hip-hop, Orhan Pamuk, ABBA Voyage, a bygone Boston, new fiction, and more.

This Is Not Justice

A Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment

The Improbable Rise and Savage Fall of Siegfried & Roy

At the peak of their fame, they were arguably the most famous magicians since Houdini.

The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat

A museum curator was forced out of her job over allegations of racism that an investigation deemed unfounded. What did her defenestration accomplish?

Let Puerto Rico Be Free

The only just future for my home is not statehood, but full independence from the United States.

Perspectives: Harper’s Magazine – November 2022

In the Running

The trials of an almost candidate – In January 2019, when I found myself sitting across from Mindy Myers in a cramped D.C. coffee shop, the new resistance was riding high. A diverse lot of Democrats had just taken control of the House of Representatives, positioning themselves to curtail Donald Trump’s devastating abuse of the presidency…

Some Like It Hot

Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society

Cover Preview: Harper’s Magazine – July 2022

Empire Burlesque by Daniel Bessner

What comes after the American Century?

In February 1941, as Adolf Hitler’s armies prepared to invade the Soviet Union, the Republican oligarch and publisher Henry Luce laid out a vision for global domination in an article titled the american century. World War II, he argued, was the result of the United States’ immature refusal to accept the mantle of world leadership after the British Empire had begun to deteriorate in the wake of World War I. American foolishness, the millionaire claimed, had provided space for Nazi Germany’s rise. The only way to rectify this mistake and prevent future conflict was for the United…

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Covid-19: Can A Vaccine Be Developed That Lasts?

“Roughly two and a half years into the pandemic, White House officials and health experts have reached a pivotal conclusion about Covid-19 vaccines: The current approach of offering booster shots every few months isn’t sustainable.

Though most vaccines take years to develop, the Covid shots now in use were created in record time—in a matter of months. For health authorities and a public desperate for tools to deal with the pandemic, their speedy arrival provided a huge lift, preventing hospitalizations and deaths while helping people to escape lockdowns and return to work, school and many other aspects of pre-Covid life.”

Books: ‘The Tiny Bee That Hovers At The Center Of The World’ – David Searcy

An ethereal meditation on longing, loss, and time, sweeping from the highways of Texas to the canals of Mars–by the acclaimed essayist and author of Shame and Wonder

David Searcy’s writing is enchanting and peculiar, obsessed with plumbing the mysteries and wonders of our everyday world, the beauty and cruelty of time, and nothing less than what he calls “the whole idea of meaning.” In The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World, he leads the reader across the landscapes of his extraordinary mind, moving from the decaying architectural wonder that is the town of Arcosanti, Arizona, to driving the vast, open Texas highway in his much-abused college VW Beetle, to the mysterious, canal-riddled Martian landscape that famed astronomer Percival Lowell first set eyes on, via his telescope, in 1894. Searcy does not come at his ideas directly, but rather digresses and meditates and analyzes until some essential truth has been illuminated–and it is in that journey that the beauty is found.

Read an essay by David Searcy

Global Health Essays: ‘The Politics Of Stopping Pandemics’ (New Yorker)

He identifies a cluster of non-medical drivers of deadly outbreaks—war, political instability, human migration, poverty, urbanization, anti-science and nationalist sentiment, and climate change—and maintains that advances in biomedicine must be accompanied by concerted action on these geopolitical matters.

War and Pestilence ride together as two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and there is no shortage of historical precedent to demonstrate the aptness of the allegory. The great influenza pandemic that began in 1918 was propelled, in part, by troop movements and population shifts at the end of the First World War. Both the First and the Second World Wars produced typhus epidemics. Armed conflicts cause malnutrition, poor pest control, and sanitation problems; even the soil often becomes contaminated. Medical facilities are destroyed; doctors and nurses, diverted to combat duty, are unable to provide care, and vaccination and other mass-treatment programs usually falter.

Read full essay at The New Yorker