When I first opened The Art of Fielding, an American novel that happens to be about baseball (and that happens to have been written by a Harvard alum, Chad Harbach), it was 2 A.M. in the middle of a school week, during what Shakespeare might have called a “long, dark night of the soul,” if … Read more
Nietzsche once said that all “great philosophy” takes the form of “involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” Philosophers try to give us Truth, he said, but in the process, they betray their vantage points, their specifics fears, their peculiar hopes. “To understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at,” Nietzsche continues, “first … Read more
The best thing ever written about Facebook was probably a single line in Lawrence Lessig’s review of The Social Network: “What’s important here,” Lessig says, in his characteristically vehement way, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) … Read more
Take a look at the magazine in your hands. Ask yourself: Why bother? What can “student journalists,” those youthful folks who put this magazine together, hope to offer our world? I suspect that most campus publications, emulating their counterparts in the world of professional publishing, would prefer that this question never be asked. They might … Read more
America and the Courts