“Change”

“Nouns and verbs let us call mere expressions.  For we cannot use mere nouns or verbs, when expressing or enunciating something, for the purpose of making a statement, and that is so whether we happen to express a spontaneous opinion or someone propounded a question to which we are giving an answer.”  Aristotle, On Interpretation

On Reading

“A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”  - C.G. Lichtenberg

Socrates on Sophistry and the Mob

“Do you too believe, as do the many, that certain young men are corrupted by sophists, and that there are certain sophists who in a private capacity corrupt to an extent worth mentioning?  Isn’t it rather the very men who say this who are the biggest sophists, who educate most perfectly and who turn out [...]

Machiavelli’s Study

“When evening comes, I return home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am [...]

de Tocqueville on Ancient Literature

“All who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations ought frequently to refresh themselves at the springs of ancient literature: there is no more wholesome medicine for the mind.  Not that I hold the literary productions of the ancients to be irreproachable; but I think that they have some special merits, admirably calculated to counterbalance [...]

FLATHEAD The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman. By Matt Taibbi

I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just [...]

Who Framed George Lakoff? by Evan R. Goldstein

A noted linguist reflects on his tumultuous foray into politics

By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN
San Francisco
George P. Lakoff is falling asleep. It is a bright summer afternoon in San Francisco, and Lakoff is nursing a latte at a small table near the entrance of a bustling, sun-dappled cafe. “This is what happens when you are 67,” he [...]

When Lit-Crit Mattered by James Seaton

Praising It New
Edited by Garrick Davis
Swallow Press, 332 pages, $36.95
It may be hard to imagine — given our current obsessions with television shows, movies, instant-messaging, Facebook and blogs — but literature was once at the center of American cultural life. In the middle of the 20th century, novels and poems, of varying quality and aspiration, [...]

THE SHAKESPEARED BRAIN by Philip Davis

In Shakespeare what is apparently a small matter is actually often a big deal made seemingly small only because it is happening at pace. The moment of a decision in Macbeth, of a death in Lear: they are no sooner there than gone, with hardly time for the thing to sink in. Says poor Phebe [...]

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

By DOUGLAS BIRCH
Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW (AP) – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin’s slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.
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