I first turned to the pickup artists after losing in love. Or, to be precise, winning—and then losing. Rachel and I had followed each other silently around our university’s campus in the way that only a university campus allows. We had “fortuitous” meetings in the café (where we each knew the other would be); tried [...]

Tolle just sits and stares. He doesn’t even move his eyes. I’m already mentally narrating the experience to my friends and I get the feeling that everyone else in the theater is as well. What if he just looks at us for the full two hours? Could we handle it? Would people insist on refunds? Is he — ‘Welcome,’ he says, after what my voice recorder indicates (deceptively, I’m sure) has been a half-minute, ‘to this moment.’ Awesome. I want to applaud so badly. Eckhart Tolle is the true vehicle.

Wallace became the chronicler of a world where it was ‘tough’ to be human, but not impossible. This was the subjective world of his readers, themselves animated by an anxious consciousness of their limitations and contingency. It was an article of faith for him that the educated person still came to serious literature for answers to the desperate questions of existence. If literature’s response was that this person, despite all appearances, no longer existed in any meaningful sense, this was a way of ending a conversation, not starting one.

Popular science is part of popular culture: our shelves teem with tomes that flatter and patronize us in equal measure, and every fallen senator is the victim of his genes. But what about popular philosophy? Is there a philosophical version of Steven Pinker? Various names spring to mind—Simon Blackburn, A.C. Grayling and Alain de Botton [...]

Michel Houellebecq has published four novels, all of them bitter and miserable. Their pessimism isn’t the only thing to them, or necessarily the most important thing, but it is probably the first that you’ll notice. Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Les Particules élémentaires (1998), Plateforme (2001) and La Possibilité d’une île (2005)—published [...]

Ultimately, in the argument about work and how it should be done, one has only one’s pleasures to offer. It is possible … to be in one’s place, in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer to be– or of another place [...]

There is something very striking about the mises-en-scène, the characters and the plot developments in the genre (a disputed classification) or historical cycle (by rough consensus 1941-1958) known as “film noir.” With respect to virtually any significant or pivotal action treated in many of these films (things like murdering someone or cheating on a spouse [...]

Astra Taylor is a gifted young filmmaker. Examined Life shows a keen visual imagination and a vivid sense of atmosphere and place. It also testifies to a personal passion for philosophy. What I shall say in criticism of the film should not be taken as denigration of Taylor’s talent, creativity or sincerity. Still, I found [...]

The fall of 2009 saw something of an apotheosis for Chicago theater. Following in the wake of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning August: Osage County—an epic family drama in the grand American tradition of O’Neill, Miller and Williams—a pair of plays set in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood opened in Times Square. Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain, a generic [...]

The night of March 19th, 2003, I was alone in the lounge of my college dorm, watching the TV and waiting for bombs to begin falling on Baghdad. I was tired. I caught myself wishing it would get started already. I caught myself welcoming the idea that it would. That week I had been lending [...]