Ed Simon
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Articles by Ed Simon
The Cathedral of Learning Is Pittsburgh’s Secular Temple
A son of the Iowa prairies, John G. Bowman didn’t take the dramatic hills and rugged valleys of western Pennsylvania for granted after he became the tenth chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh. This may explain how he was able to view the city as a site for one of the most audacious projects in the history of American higher education.
Eternity Is Now
Hemon’s mysticism neither confirms nor denies the transcendent, the numinous, or the supernatural; it’s simply indifferent to them. It’s an estimably fleshy and physical mysticism in which the only thing “that is ever true is being alive,” as he writes in “Uncle Real.” From that single axiom—the reality not of our thought but of our embodiment—Hemon derives an ethic of life based on the intransigent power of the single second of existence in the face of the universe’s indifference.
Whereof One Cannot Speak: On the Limits of Language to Describe Pain
When the pain first arrived, it was during an uncharacteristically temperate Chicago summer more than a decade ago. First as a slight tingling in my right jaw, barely noticeable, which I could basically ignore as I walked past the red-bricked town homes of Hyde Park while spending a summer seminar at the University of Chicago. Only in the morning after the first day that I noticed this sensation in my teeth which I couldn’t quite localize did the real pain commence.
Lonnie Bunch’s Resignation Is a Wake-Up Call
Opinion — 3 min read Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III speaks near the desk that former President Thomas Jefferson used to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776; taken on May 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. (photo Al Drago for The Washington Post via Getty Images) In 2003, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin successfully defended a dissertation based on meticulous research across French, Spanish, and English. Kevin D.
The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ Has a Message from Your Future
Revolver Parlophone | Capitol From the beginning of Mad Men’s seven seasons that first broadcast in 2007, there was discussion among fans of how the quintessential television series about the 1960s, known for its exacting detail in everything from Brooks Brothers’ suit cuts to mid-century restaurant menus, Grand Central Station train schedules, and furniture design, would depict the cultural phenomenon of the Beatles.
AI Companies Are Pulping Our Humanity
Opinion — 2 min read Unknown North Netherlandish artist, “Roundel with Allegorical Scene of Book Burning” (c. 1520–30), colorless glass, vitreous paint, and silver stain (image public domain CC0 via the Metropolitan Museum of Art) After Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus was burnt at the stake in 1553 for religious heresy, only three surviving copies of his The Restoration of Christianity would be spared from the bonfire.
The Age of Enoch and Metatron
ELYSIUM A Visual History of Angeology By Ed Simon (Abrams, 2023) *** When surveying the astral realms, John Dee, the great angelologist and chief astrologer to the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England, made use of a perfectly circular disk of jet-black obsidian, a special mirror which had found its way to Britain from Spain, before that having been one of the ritual objects used by the Aztec priests in the pyramidical Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan.
Kafka Remains the Jewish Prophet of Oblivion
With none of the stateliness of the grasshopper or the elegance of the cricket, the beauty of the butterfly or even the gothic sublimity of the spider, the cockroach is among evolution’s most detestable of insects. That throbbing fecal-colored concentrically segmented thorax and the grotesque-papery wings, the crooked legs and the doll-like black eyes.
The Last and First Romantic
Virtually no verse survives of the semi-mythic ancient Greek poet Aristeas. No complete elegies or epigrams, odes or lyrics endures, yet the breath of this forgotten figure animates all of poetic history, so that his unrecognized epic is composed of the words of Homer and Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Whitman and Dickinson, Neruda and Akhmatova.
The Problem of Evil Won't Go Away
The Devil has stalked the pages of journalist Randall Sullivan’s and Ed Simon’s books, a whiff of sulfur apparent across the pages of their writing. Both authors have long been concerned with theodicy, with the question of evil; how such misfortune and wickedness is possible in a world created by a benevolent and omnipotent God.
Milton in the Anthropocene
MILTON IN THE ANTHROPOCENE By Ed Simon *** The Montréal Review, October 2024 Only a few short decades after the Spanish had razed Tenochtitlan, the rubble of her limestone and adobe bricks which once constituted the foundations of temples to Xitle and Quetzalcoatl repurposed by the conquerors in the erection of their Metropolitan Cathedral, the triumphant Aztec capital of broad, cactus lined boulevards and massive pyramids, intimidating ball courts and sumptuous canals of blue glinting in the...
A New Inquisition?
Among the seemingly never-ending flurry of authoritarian executive orders signed by Donald Trump during the incredibly long first month of his second term was a February 6th directive entitled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” According to the order, previous administrations had been involved in the “anti-Christian weaponization of government,” and in response to this imagined persecution, the White House claims that it will “ensure that any unlawful and improper conduct, policies, or...
The Smithsonian Is Not the President’s Museum
In 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was established, in the words of its benefactor and namesake, British scientist James Smithson, “for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men.” Today, the 21 museums centered in Washington, DC, and more than 200 affiliates throughout the United States, have indeed increased and diffused knowledge in the maintenance of an astounding 157 million objects.
Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence
By Ed Simon July 20, 2026 Fire (circa 1805), William Blake, The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons. The philosopher’s stone, desired by alchemists for its mythic ability to transmute lead into gold, was once in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius—mystic, monastic, and magician—supposedly came into possession of said stone shortly before his death in 1708.
The American Revolution Was More Radical Than the Founders Wanted
A popular anecdote maintains that, upon their defeat at Yorktown, Lord Charles Cornwallis’s British fife-and-drum regiment was instructed by General George Washington to perform the Royalist anthem “The World Turned Upside Down.” As appealing as the story is, it’s almost certainly apocryphal. Traditionally, the losing army would have played a melody associated with the winning side, in this case either an American or French tune.
The Hudson River School’s American Apocalypse
Opinion — 10 min read Frederic Edwin Church, “Our Banner in the Sky” (1861), oil on paper (photo public domain CC0 via Wikimedia Commons) By the standards of geological epochs, Kaaterskill Falls in Upstate New York is positively youthful.
Conjuring the Future Phrase by Phrase
If America’s tale is best told through the pastoral—through seeds carried westward on winds not of their own choosing—then it must be acknowledged that this nation is no Arcadia of uncomplicated leisure and repose. Antebellum plantations had no role for the shepherd and shepherdess Strephon and Celia. Their ploughing was consensual; in America it was compelled.
Did the World Turn Upside Down?
A popular anecdote maintains that, upon their defeat at Yorktown, Lord Charles Cornwallis’s British fife-and-drum regiment was instructed by General George Washington to perform the Royalist anthem “The World Turned Upside Down.” As appealing as the story is, it’s almost certainly apocryphal. Traditionally, the losing army would have played a melody associated with the winning side, in this case either an American or French tune.
Ed Simon’s Book Notes music playlist for his book American Elegy
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. The 50 short critical essays in Ed Simon’s book American Elegy each offer a glimpse at United States history through cultural icons, history, and more.
Edward Hopper’s Distinctly American Solitude
Editor’s Note: The following text has been excerpted with permission and adapted from American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States by Ed Simon, published by Ig Publishing on June 2 and available online and in bookstores. The exact location of the late-night diner depicted in Edward Hopper’s celebrated, disdained, over-exposed, frequently parodied, and beloved painting, “Nighthawks” (1942), is a matter of some conjecture.
Genuflecting Before “Don Colossus”
The Book of Exodus is unequivocal on the matter. During Moses’s 40-day-and-40-night sojourn atop Mount Sinai, wherein the prophet would receive the Ten Commandments from the Lord, the anxious Hebrews abandoned in the desert melted down their gold and fashioned a calf to whom they’d offer hosannas. Dancing about the idol, burning incense and offerings, the multitude praised not God, but rather this crude, wanton, and ostentatious object of their own crafting.
The Carnegie International Looks Back at Itself
PITTSBURGH — When the landmark exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collectionlaunched at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, artist Chris Ofili became a major player in the scrum of the culture wars.
Hans Holbein Painted the Human
Holbein, “Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (The Ambassadors)” (1533), oil on oak, held at National Gallery, London (all photos courtesy Yale University Press) The most succinct visual embodiment of the complexities and contradictions of the English Renaissance is displayed on an ornate mantel in a mansion at 1 East 70th Street in Manhattan. Hans Holbein the Younger’s c.
Salvador Dalí’s Frustrating Vision of the Divine
Three weeks after Easter in 1961, at Glasgow’s red-brick, resplendent, rococo Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, a 22-year-old man took a rock to Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic 1951 painting “Christ of Saint John of the Cross.”At a red museum in a green corner of a gray city, out of a surfeit of zealous religious conviction, a vandal had torn an eight-foot gash in the body of Christ.
The Marquis de Sade of the Upper East Side
Opinion — 9 min read Millionaire rapist Jeffrey Epstein shared a lot with the Marquis de Sade. (edit Shari Flores/Hyperallergic) Editor’s Note: The following story contains mentions of sexual assault. To reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org. Ten days before several hundred sans-culottes and Parisian commoners, armed with filched muskets and cobblestones, stormed the Bastille, its most notorious prisoner had already been transferred.
Why Does Contemporary Fascism Fetishize the Classics?
Having acquired a hundred acres adjacent to the royal residences in Castelporziano in 1906, the House of Savoy commissioned an archeological dig on their new land. From the sandy soil displaced during the excavation of a villa built during the Emperor Hadiran’s reign emerged a startling object—a life-size sculpture of Carrera marble, a nude male figure whose lean and taut body is posed in the second before throwing an object, apparent even though the statue is missing an arm and its head.
How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
Giorgio de Chirico, "The Red Tower" (1913), oil on canvas, held by the Guggenheim Museum (photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons) Had Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania not closed seven years ago, the shopping center — the third-largest in the world when it opened, with 200 tenants — would be approaching its 50th anniversary.
Pokémon Backpack
We jokingly called it “the daycare.” The green backpack unfolded into a Pokémon playset, a plastic eyesore that consistently entertained a group of seven-year-olds for hours. During the early months of the pandemic, I lugged the Pokémon Carry Case Playset to parks and playgrounds then marveled at how it occupied my younger son and his friends. No more complaints about being cold at their older brothers’ flag football games. No more whining about being bored at chilly soccer practices.
The Most Faustian of Technologies - Reactor
There are no artifacts of the Brazen Head in the crypt of Lincoln Cathedral. No polished bronze eye-sockets, no brass cranium, no iron-forged lips that moved and made oracular pronouncements, no relics of the supposed mechanical, magical, miracle constructed by the thirteenth-century theologian, philosopher, and bishop Robert Grosseteste which are embedded below the nave of Lincoln Cathedral.
Inside the Long History of Technologically Assisted Writing
ChatGPT-3—the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer—has recently turned all of us who write into nascent John Henrys, ready to strike the hammer at either the rail or the computer.
The Work Behind the Writing: On Writers and Their Day Jobs
For nineteen years, until his retirement in 1885, Herman Melville would awake, slick back his dark hair and unsnarl the snags from his beard, don a uniform of dark navy pilot cloth and affix to his chest the brass badge of a U.S. Customs Inspector. Operating at the Lower Manhattan docks, Melville’s task was to examine ship manifests against unloaded cargo. “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” said Ishmael in Moby-Dick.
Making Meaning: Why Symbolic Interpretation Matters In Art And Literature | Independent Newspaper Nigeria
0 Among my favorite works exhibited in the Scaife Galleries of my hometown Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art is a beguiling, enigmatic, and beautiful 1956 painting by René Magritte entitled Le Coeur du Monde— “The Heart of the World.” Completed after Magritte had already established his international reputation as among the most influential and important of Surrealists (being less eerie that de Chirico or kitschy than Dali), The Heart of the World is a portrait of distinctly feminine...
3 Quarks Daily
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty. -2 Corinthians 3:17 If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. -Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky It had been twenty centuries since He'd last walked upon the Earth, and it was in the ninth year of the new reign that He quietly appeared again late afternoon on a cold Christmas Eve, this time at a needle-exchange clinic in Alphabet City.
The Egalitarian Vision of Nativity Scenes
Features — 9 min read Sandro Botticelli, "The Mystical Nativity" (1500), oil on canvas, held at the National Gallery, London (photo via Wikimedia Commons) The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola had been martyred less than two years when the early Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli completed his strange painting “The Mystical Nativity” around 1500.
A Visual History of No Kings
For those depressed by our seeming never-ending winter of political horror, there is reason to be heartened, for we are entering a rightfully anti-monarchical moment. Take, for instance, the No Kings movement, born in response to Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. Anti-monarchical movements have always required aesthetic subversion alongside political resistance. The history of such art, from toppled statues to revolutionary paintings, reveals what’s possible, and what’s needed.
Reality shifting opens portals to the weirdness of our world
For neuroscience, magic opens a doorway to multiple realities The transition in magic from possible to impossible can answer some of the key questions in philosophy and neuroscience by Luis M Martínez & Jordi Camí Ancient Indian texts reveal the liberating power of metaphysics Indian metaphysics presented a philosophical route to a higher level of existence beyond limits of space and time by Jessica Frazier How to think about weird things From discs in the sky to faces in toast, learn to...
The Hidden Lightbulb: Sketching Apophatic Literature
Behind the neo-classical façade of the Tate Gallery in Milbank, all grey stone and Corinthian columned, its pediment topped with a grandiose visage of Britannia with her trident and Grecian martial helmet, there is a near-revolutionary work of art first displayed to great controversy in 2001.
El hallazgo accidental que reconstruyó la historia del primer teatro comercial
Cuando unos obreros de la construcción en Londres cavaban los cimientos para una torre de oficinas en 1989, encontraron algo curioso a pocos metros en la arcilla gruesa, azulada y empapada: una gran cantidad de cáscaras de avellanas rotas. Excavaciones adicionales revelaron lo que era una clara evidencia de un teatro en gran medida olvidado, y los arqueólogos determinaron que había tantas cáscaras enterradas porque estos alimentos se vendían como concesión hace siglos.
Shakespeare Becoming Shakespeare, With Help From His Working-Class Peers
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Amazon Apple Books Barnes & Noble Books-A-Million Bookshop.org When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
Maurizio Cattelan Is No Duchamp
In 1913, when Igor Stravinsky premiered his orchestral work The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Parisian audiences were so incensed by the discordant score that a riot broke out. Four years later, New Yorkers were only slightly more genteel toward French artist Marcel Duchamp’s submission of a ready-made upside-down urinal autographed by the fictitious creator “R. Mutt” to the inaugural exhibition of New York’s Society of Independent Artists.
The Algorithmic Presidency
One of the coin collector’s most coveted treasures is an Ancient Roman denarius minted around 45 BCE, featuring a laurel-wreathed profile of the statesman Julius Caesar. The four-gram coin contains more than 90% silver, but precious metals aren’t what make the denarii valuable. Nor is it the rarity of mint condition examples that drives the value of the coin to upwards of $1,000.
Close Reading Carl Sagan
Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that's sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art.
An Unfinished History of the Antichrist
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The Tackiness of Evil
Half a century ago, Uranus-Izvor, a community atop Bucharest’s Dealul Hill, was a neighborhood of church spires and onion domes, of Rococo Habsburg elegance and Romanian charm.
No One Will Ever Stop Our Songs
Essay No One Will Ever Stop Our Songs Jerome Rothenberg’s final anthology is his masterpiece: a centuries-spanning tribute to the complexity and contradictions of the American people, whatever illusory border separates them.
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Ed Simon Imagines the Messiness
We read for many reasons - to be edified and educated, entertained and enlightened; but let's be honest, sometimes we just want a nice, strong cup of tea. Whether there is some malignancy in my soul or not, the novels which I read over the past two months greatly indulged my not-so-secret inner energy vampire. Accounts of embarrassments, addictions, traumas, affairs and dramatic scenes. My currency through these books, all of them recently published, was that of cringe. And I loved them.
Are We Headed for Apocalypse? This Book Says It’s a 1-in-3 Chance.
David Del Rio portrayed a young lawyer on one of television’s most popular shows. David Del Rio, who portrayed a young lawyer on the popular CBS procedural “Matlock,” has left the television series shortly before the premiere of its second season. CBS confirmed his departure but declined to comment …
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