The Philosopher's Stone

When I was flailing about, looking for something on which to blog, someone suggested a commentary on Volume Three of CAPITAL.  I went back a...

Patience is one of the many virtues that I have never managed to cultivate.  If I were a farmer, I would be forever pulling up sprouts to se...

I had an email asking me what the pun is in the title of Philip Roth's novel , Portnoy's Complaint.   Okay, so that is a bald-faced ...

The conventions are over.  The Republican convention was bizarre, the Democratic convention pretty much the sort of successful event one wou...

Back in the '50's, when I was a student and then a young Instructor   at Harvard, Sigmund Freud's theories of human personal...

Good God!  Jim is perfectly correct.  In January I wrote a multi-part Appreciation of MIMESIS, a fact that I had totally forgotten.  It is c...

Nate Silver, as all political junkies know, is the baseball stats guru who has morphed into a politics stats guru, running the blog 538.com,...