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  1. Photos

    The Sophist (216C-217E)

    The distinction among sophist, statesman, and philosopher is posed as a threefold classification whose members, the Stranger maintains, are difficult to define clearly. Socrates first portrays genuine philosophers as assuming many apparent forms because most people fail to recognize them: as they observe life in different cities, they may be judged worthless or supremely valuable and may be mistaken for statesmen, sophists, or even madmen. He therefore asks whether the Stranger’s country treats these three names as designating one, two, or three classes; the Stranger answers that they are three, while stressing that determining the nature of each is no small or easy task. When Theodorus notes that the question resembles one previously put to the Stranger, Socrates asks whether he prefers a continuous exposition or a question-and-answer exchange, recalling Parmenides’ use of the latter method. The Stranger says dialogue is easier with a cooperative interlocutor but otherwise favors an uninterrupted speech, and Socrates invites him to choose the young Theaetetus or another participant. Although initially embarrassed to deliver a long address on his first visit, the Stranger indicates that the subject cannot be handled through brief replies and will require an extended speech.

    Philosophy#TheSophist#HierarchyofBeing
  2. PDF

    Government Priorities

    This review of John P. Murphy’s New Deal Art examines how the U.S. government treated art as a necessity within Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal from 1933 to 1943, using evidence including Seymour Fogel’s mural “Wealth of the Nation,” the Works Progress Administration’s community art centers, Charles White’s “Five Great American Negroes,” and Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” It praises the book’s accessible presentation of this rich Depression-era aesthetic tradition while noting that its narrative sometimes becomes mired in bureaucratic detail, and concludes that Pearl Harbor and the shift to wartime priorities ended the government’s capacity and desire to support the arts at the same level.

    Arts#FiveGreatAmericanNegroes#publicart
  3. PDF

    The Roots of Treasure

    This review discusses Jeremy Harte’s Treasures on Earth, arguing that folklore about hidden riches reflects deep desires for transformative wealth and fears of loss across the British Isles. It draws on tales of guarded hoards, doomed treasure hunts, dreams, spirits, beasts, and accidental discoveries—including Murthly’s treasure-guarding black dog—and examines regional patterns such as storms interrupting Welsh quests and golden coffins appearing chiefly in southern England. Although such oral traditions are difficult to date and document, Harte organizes them through recurring local themes and ultimately emphasizes that the people within treasure stories are more compelling than the gold itself.

    Literature & Criticism#Britishfolklore#regionalfolklore
  4. PDF

    Hard-Wired

    This review argues that Nicholas Wright’s Warhead overlooks scientific evidence about the reciprocal relationship between warfare and neurobiology: studies find lasting changes in brain regions associated with memory, motivation, threat perception, and trauma among soldiers and civilian survivors, while cognitive rigidity, impulsivity, and differences in the prefrontal cortex are linked to vulnerability to extremist or authoritarian ideologies. It criticizes the book’s cheerful, admiring treatment of war and its proposal that democracies exploit “survival-grade neural machinery” to win conflicts, concluding that brain science instead shows the brain to be malleable and demonstrates that war diminishes human capacities and profoundly alters individual bodies.

    Science & Technology#neuroscience#brainplasticity
  5. PDF

    The World in Gentle Collapse

    This review examines Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Into the Sun, originally published in 1922 as Présence de la mort and newly translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, in which a shift in Earth’s axis sends the planet toward the sun. It argues that the novel is both timely in its depiction of denial and profound in its reflections on nature, daily life, and humanity’s inability to comprehend catastrophe, citing the townspeople’s initially sharpened perceptions, the failure of collective action, and the descent into hysteria and violence. The review praises the translators’ rendering and retitling of the novel, concluding that it presents the end of the world as a gentle collapse marked by confusion and fear of an unimaginable fate.

    Literature & Criticism#Prediction#ClimateChange