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A selection of my published work since 2001 is available here. Contact me with any specific requests.

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A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity

A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity
A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity…

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As with so many things, Jacques Barzun got there long before I did, writing back in July 1986 for Harper’s that there is an overabundance of art around, and it can’t be properly digested. He was speaking about how the idea that there can’t be too much art was proving problematic when it came time for funding, but what he said at the end of the essay applies broadly to the idea of oversupply: When I hear of someone’s proudly “spending the day at the museum,” I wonder at the effect: The intake is surely akin to that of an alcoholic. Music likewise is anesthetic when big doses — symphony after symphony, opera on top of opera — are administered without respite. We should remember the Greeks’ practice of exposing themselves to one tragic trilogy and one comedy on but a single day each year … The glut has made us into gluttons, who gorge and do not digest.

As with so many things, Jacques Barzun got there long before I did, writing back in July 1986 for Harper’s that there is an overabundance …

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It’s a concept that remains with us today: painters, novelists and composers are still regarded with a penumbra of awe, and none of us ever pauses to think that even the humblest nut and bolt was at some point the product of human creativity, too. Art, almost by definition, doesn’t function: it may decorate our lives and enlarge our minds and provide spiritual pleasure and enlightenment, but does it really deserve the sacred status that its association with “creativity” gives it? As a society, we have arrived at a false valuation of the creative artist, with wildly excessive rewards for some of those who write novels or paint portraits (£20 million for a Lucien Freud?) and an education system that expends disproportionate time and energy encouraging and sponsoring people to become, in effect, day-dreamers. Instead, we should be investing more respect and money in the acquisition of ordinary skills and practical crafts that would allow us to take more control of our own lives. “The hand is the window to the mind,” said the philosopher Kant, and the same relationship should be acknowledged as the hub of creativity, too.

It’s a concept that remains with us today: painters, novelists and composers are still regarded with a penumbra of awe, and none of us ever …

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Literary works offer their readers a range of experiences that philosophical prose cannot provide, reshaping their perceptions in a variety of ways. Some of these experiences are varieties of emotional response; some are experiences of dislocation and a loss of meaning; some are experiences of losing a sense of meaning and then finding it again; some are experiences of not being able to figure out who or what a certain person is, or even what a person or self might be. And sometimes the experience is that of following the shifting trajectory of a human relationship.

Literary works offer their readers a range of experiences that philosophical prose cannot provide, reshaping their perceptions in a variety of ways. Some of these …

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As consumers use the internet to isolate and refine their particular interests – whether news and entertainment, or bomb-making and pornography – they create a fragmented world of “echo chambers” isolated from the public space in which a healthy democracy thrives. Sunstein makes the crucial point that this process is not simply depoliticizing; rather, it creates a vacuum into which extreme views creep.

As consumers use the internet to isolate and refine their particular interests – whether news and entertainment, or bomb-making and pornography – they create a …

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Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or passion, or intellect, but their decisiveness.

Where have all the most appealing men gone? Married young, most of them—and sometimes to women whose most salient characteristic was not their beauty, or …

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Where do all the neurotics live? On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.

Where do all the neurotics live? On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.
Where do all …

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Twenty years after that first photocopied list, it’s safe to say that Leiter, a professor at the University of Texas Law School, is the most powerful man in academic philosophy.

Twenty years after that first photocopied list, it’s safe to say that Leiter, a professor at the University of Texas Law School, is the most …

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