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Articles by Robert Boyers
Feast of Fools | Lewis H. Lapham
All power corrupts but some must govern. —John le Carré The members of the assembly that is this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly speak to the practice of politics as both an art and a science, define the always bitter argument as the how and why of who owes what to whom.
The War on Bugs - JSTOR Daily
The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. What do you do when faced with a cockroach? Run in fear, stamp it underfoot, or poison and suffocate it with insecticide? Now, what would you do if that same cockroach were twelve feet tall, towering above you with clacking mandibles? Moviegoers in the 1950s were invited to imagine such giant insects threatening them and life as they knew it.
Authority Freedom - Salmagundi Magazine
Jed Perl has long seemed to many of us the most vital, informed and original art critic in the country. John Ashbery wrote some years ago of his “tremendous empathy and unsparing accuracy,” and noted that “his ability to recognize the traditional forms of art behind their continual transmutation has made his an almost solitary, essential voice.” His new book, Authority and Freedom, is a defense of the arts at a time when they need defending.
The Tyranny of Virtue
About The Book From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition.
The Death Of The Artist Excellent Sheep
Robert Boyers: About a decade ago you were writing a blog for The American Scholar, and when you gave that up you noted that you’d become habituated to thinking in blog-sized units. Clearly that seemed to you a problem for someone wanting to write the important books and essays that you’ve given us in recent years. So what exactly is it like to develop such a habit and thus to think primarily in blog-sized units?
The Term 'Privilege' Has Been Weaponized
AP Photo/Russell Contreras, File Accusations of ‘privilege' are a form of one-upsmanship – and a charge against which there is no real defense. In recent years, Skidmore College, where I am a professor, has been roiled by political incidents large and small.
The Tyranny of Virtue
From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition.
The Privilege Predicament - The American Scholar
Kevin Chodzinski/Flickr In my freshman year at Queens College, I had a strange awakening—strange in that the attendant, overmastering emotion was a combination of humiliation and pleasure. My English professor had called me to his desk and handed me the A+ paper I had written on Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and suggested that I make an appointment to see him.
Philip Roth's Examination of the Ordinary
The ordinary man in American Pastoral is an assimilated Jew with an unlikely “steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask” and the youthful attributes of a demi-god. The young Seymour “Swede” Levov is a star athlete worshiped by everyone in his neighborhood in Newark, a large “household Apollo” of an adolescent who goes on from schoolboy fame to marry a Catholic beauty queen, inherit a thriving business, and move his family to a prosperous farm in rural New Jersey.
How ‘Safe Spaces’ Stifle Ideas
In After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that, when a culture is in good shape, its condition will have much to do with the robust arguments conducted under its auspices about the good or the virtuous. An emphasis, there, on argument, that has always seemed to me compelling. I find it impossible to imagine a social order I would want to live in that isn’t built around a continuing, even interminable series of arguments.
How 'Safe Spaces' Stifle Ideas
In After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that, when a culture is in good shape, its condition will have much to do with the robust arguments conducted under its auspices about the good or the virtuous. An emphasis, there, on...
Lapham’s Quarterly
From A Cruising Voyage Round the World. Having been blown south in a storm while rounding Cape Horn, Rogers’ ship the Duke sailed to refresh provisions at Juan Fernández Island, where the privateer made the acquaintance of the marooned Selkirk. His description of the encounter served as the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.
Nauseous Puddle Water
From The Women’s Petition Against Coffee. A reply to this anonymously published pamphlet came in the form of another anonymously published pamphlet, The Men’s Response to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee, which stated, “Have we not with excess of patience borne your affronts, been sweated, purged, fluxed between two featherbeds, flogged, jibbed, and endured all the rest of the Devil’s martyrdoms, and will you still offer to repine?
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