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Bowie by O’Neill

An article promoting the immanent release of this book (H/T Richie said). He also brought a dog on to the set, which jumped up in shock at the flash of the strobe lighting, perfectly capturing the kind of avant garde chaos Bowie had intended for his dystopian album, influenced by George Orwell’s 1984. David Bowieelizabeth…

Indulgent Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator

Cognitive neuroscience is in the midst of what has been called an “affective revolution,” which places empathy at the center of a core set of moral competencies. While empathy has not been without its critics (Bloom, 2013; Prinz, 2011), both the radicals and the reactionaries routinely cite Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS)…

Peter Viereck

Born on this date. If you appreciate Percy’s Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays, then you’ll definitely appreciate Viereck. Both were incredibly subtle, independent-minded and scathing and both happen to have been born in 1916. Here’s a piece entitled “Peter Viereck: European-American Conscience–1916-2006” sent to me by the late Irving Louis Horowitz. Irving Louis HorowitzPeter ViereckPoetryWalker…

Knowing Our Limits

Nathan Ballantyne’s soon to be published Knowing Our Limits seems a promising read for those of us who write about issues of epistemic modesty, dispersed knowledge and complexity. Bounded Rationalitycomplexitydispersed knowledgeepistemic modestyEpistemologyNathan Ballantynesituated cognitionsocial epistemology

A Confederacy of Dunces: Stephen Fry on his decades-long struggle to adapt the most unfilmable book ever written

From The Telegraph, by Alexander Larman. As per the cover art, the edited book Theology and Geometry is in press. +++++++++ In 1969, the 31-year old, would-be author John Kennedy Toole killed himself. Frustrated and miserable that his magnum opus, a picaresque New Orleans-set comic novel entitled A Confederacy of Dunces, had failed to find a publisher,…

Doreen Ketchens and Ricky Riccardi

Good to see Doreen &c. featured in the latest issue of OffBeat. I’ve spoken to her several times when I’ve come across her cnr. Royal and St. Peter. As she says, she is typically asked “‘What do you have new?’ So we try to do an album every year.” This article sheds much light on Doreen’s…