https://www.themontrealreview.com Politics, Culture, Ideas https://www.themontrealreview.com/photo2/montreal_page/top-banner-small.gif https://www.themontrealreview.com https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Odd_Incling.php Often overshadowed by his fellow Inklings, Tolkien and Lewis, Charles Williams is perhaps the most enigmatic of the trio. This essay delves into his "supernatural thrillers," revealing them as profound explorations of Christian mysticism and complex theology. Discover the incantatory magic of his work, where the Holy Grail, doppelgangers, and Platonic Ideas collide with the suburbs of England... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/America_today_my_opinion_right_or_wrong.php 'Right or wrong, it's my opinion!'—this fierce certainty, fueled by social media's abstracting power, is ripping America's political fabric apart. Forget nuanced debate; today's discourse traps us in echo chambers, where challenging our pre-set views feels impossible. Discover how this retreat from complex realities denies the vital 'coincidence of opposites' essential for a unified nation... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Remembering_Max_Weber.php Haim Marantz's essay, 'Remembering Max Weber,' re-evaluates the foundational sociologist, arguing his unique strength lies in methodological pluralism, not a single, unifying master theory like those of Marx or Freud. His influential work spans diverse inquiries, from the correlation between Protestantism and Capitalism to his crucial concept of the "ideal type." The article celebrates Weber's commitment to intellectual integrity and "unconditional sobriety," positioning him as a vital counterpoint to ideological zealotry. Read this fresh perspective on one of the modern world's most essential thinkers... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Writing_Without_Style.php Language might seem an essential constituent of identity. It is hard to imagine Winston Churchill orating in anything but English, and Edith Piaf would not have been Edith Piaf in Urdu or Nahuatl. But language is in fact an accident of time and place. Not only are languages always in flux, but few of us determine or control the ones we speak. Pablo Neruda did not choose Spanish as his native language; a conjunction of factors chose it for him.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Teaching_Charlie_Chaplin_among_the_Poets.php WAdmittedly, the solution preceded the problem. Or, at least, the practical solution did. This seemed at first provisional. But it helped me to define the fuller ideological problem. About three years ago I began to teach Charlie Chaplin in my course in Modernist poetics and aesthetics, at MIT... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Fiction/Disputation.php Our university sits comfortably on the west bank of the River Spaarne, as it has for centuries, a fixture of the tidy city of Haarlem. Though smaller and less celebrated than those at Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht, our school is no less venerable... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Intellect_vs_Reason.php Why did the Russian intelligentsia at the dawn of the twentieth century so eagerly join the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, calling for violence and justifying political terror? And why in the early twenty-first century has a significant part of the Western intelligentsia justified mass riots, vandalism, and the transformation of once-thriving cities into ghost towns with boarded-up shopfronts, overrun by vagrants and gangs? What is this mental stance: erudition, intellectualism, rationality—and at the same time, a pronounced hostility toward the rational, a thirst to overturn all values, to glorify violence and barbarism?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Do_we_really_know_anything_about_what_Jesus_said.php Elaine Pagels recently published what is likely her final work. Certainly it reads like a career summary, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (2025). We understand her argument better when we recognize that we know virtually nothing of the historical Jesus beyond two facts. It is almost certain that Jesus existed, and that he was crucified following the orders of Pontius Pilate, Roman prefect (governor) of Judaea during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, probably in the year 30 CE... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Reflections_on_Memoir.php Recently as one of the requirements in my Masters in Writing program at one of the major universities in North America, I took a workshop in memoir writing. It came as a bit of shock... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Origin_Presence_and_Time_in_the_Poetry_of_W_S_Merwin.php The keen sense of origin in W.S. Merwin’s poetry, especially in the later work after his move to Hawaii, is and has always been linked to absence, that 'paradise' where things continually vanish from human time... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Holy_Broken_Bliss.php How can a human being maintain identity and sanity in the present world? It is not only the political and social morass that disheartens, but the individual decline in our own lives... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Machines_will_become_eternal.php Machines will become eternal, or at least very long-lived, while we will lag behind them evolutionarily, unable to improve the longevity of our bodies. Or, alternatively, we will be able to integrate machines into our bodies, and this will match the longevity of non-animate matter. Whatever happens, just imagine a centennial machine that makes errors but has authority for one or another reason to make decisions over human destiny. What a problem that would be!... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/AI_Personhood.php There is no security . . . against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Consumer_Capitalism_and_the_Environmental_Crisis.php An ad pops up in social media that catches your eye. You weren’t shopping for anything, but you click on it. A couple of clicks later, your phone autofills your shipping address and credit card number. Shipping is free and, before you quite realize what you’ve done, well, you’ve bought something... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Ineffable_Passions_of_Ludwig_Wittgenstein.php There was always something tragic as well as touching about Ludwig’s self-willed, hermetic retreats. A rootless fascination with the sense of place, the paradox of all outsiders. Desperate to get away from the cloistered, petty world of academe, Wittgenstein took his Cambridge sabbatical in rustic Ireland... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Pseudo_Science_and_Potemkin_History.php Kate Brown is a prolific scholar and an engaging writer. Her first two books, A Biography of No Place1 and Plutopia, earned multiple awards from the academic community. In her third book, Dispatches from Dystopia, she refined her personal approach to writing history, which enables her to place events ‘in the moment’ – not in the moment when they transpired, but rather in the moment when she is writing about them. This approach imbues her most recent study with a sense of urgency concerning the impending disaster she sees facing humanity in the nuclear age... https://themontrealreview.com/Articles/Problem_of_consciousness_Steven_Pinker.php The word 'consciousness' has at least two meanings. One is access to a pool of information shared by a set of intercommunicating neural processes such as those that control language, recall, planning, and intentional movements. That is, some kinds of information in the brain, like the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and pains, are 'conscious' in the sense that you can ponder them, discuss them, and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds of consciousness, like the control of your heart rate... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Moral_Particulars_in_Literature.php I often share with my undergraduate philosophy students that the value of literature comes not from what it asserts or proposes in the form of propositions, but what it reveals about the humanity of human beings. At the risk of adding one more ‘ism’ to an already impressive list of theories, let’s call this approach particularism in ethics... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/An_Essay_on_The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich.php If I could only understand what it is all for! But that too is impossible... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Why_History.php The human being has been described as an essentially historical being, and it certainly is the case that for many reasons he or she necessarily needs to form some conception of his or her past. Without such a conception he or she cannot attain a proper conscious understanding of himself or herself, and so cannot be fully human.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Reclaiming_Our_Humanity_in_the_Age_of_AI.php Humans have always made tools. Their range and sophistication define us as a species, they are extensions of what we are. The spear and club are extensions of our arms, the horse and buggy of our legs, and the clock of our sense of natural time. Every time we invent a new tool, our world changes, we change, and so it must be.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Breadcrumbs_for_Birds.php While clearing out my office after years as the editor of a literary magazine and press, I stashed into my 'take' box The Essential Etheridge Knight (Pittsburgh, 1986), with painfully few other books I had gathered.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/A_Fairer_House_Than_Prose_Teaching_Emily_Dickinson.php I first taught Emily Dickinson's poetry many years ago when I was ABD, and had newly relocated from Southern California to Northampton, a small town in Western Massachusetts immediately adjacent to Amherst, where Emily Dickinson was herself born, and where she lived her entire life... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Peter_Austin_Sonnets.php She lies there, full length long, upon her bed, Upon her body not a stitch of clothing,... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Royal_Rhodes_Three_Poems.php Gates of ivory and horn close and open, as dreams leap across the borders of each night.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Man-Devil_John_Callanan.php When I saw that Princeton University Press had recently published a book titled Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John Callanan, I was immediately intrigued. The excellent red and black front cover, designed to look like an eighteenth-century title page with a bee perched on the right edge, and the captivating title were only a few of the reasons why... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Legend_of_the_New_York_Review_of_Books.php Hubris was a central theme underlying many Greek tragedies and, later, Shakespearean plays. Mythological victims of fatal pride included Agamemnon, Achilles, Sisyphus, and Icarus. The last was the son of Daedalus, the brilliant architect of King Minos’ labyrinth... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Legend_of_the_New_York_Review_of_Books.php Once upon a time, if you wanted to know what was going on in the world, what was right, and what was wrong, and what might make things better, you picked up a copy of the New York Review of Books. The Review, as fondly known, had an uncanny knack for collecting a remarkable plethora (yes, this is the way they talked) of disparate (there it is again) books which shouldn’t go together, but somehow did. That—juxtaposition—all by itself, was informative, innovative, and brilliant... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Make_The_Kitchen_Maid_King.php As is well known, Hegel advocated constitutional monarchy as the only appropriate form of political order that fits modern society. His numerous critics see this weird advocacy either as a clear sign of Hegel’s immanent philosophical limitation or as a sign of his political conformism, with some more benevolently disposed critics interpreting it as a cunning trick to delude state censorship (first among these sarcastic critics is none other than Marx)... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Life_in_the_Studio_Craig_McDaniel.php If asked to describe or explain their art – how it is made, what it means – painters face a choice. They can refuse the invitation – 'let the art speak for itself.' They can defer – 'let someone else try.' But if an artist chooses to accept the invitation, then she leaves behind the familiar mode of visual expression and enters the strange forest of semantics, word play, language. Dangers abound. ... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Why_this_disruptive_era.php It is rare to live through a shift in history as significant as today’s. In many ways, from developments in digital technology, transport or plumbing the secrets of the atom, we are very advanced. In others, such as the way we conduct politics, we are governed by greed, tribalism and flawed ideological considerations... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/A_New_Inquisition.php 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.'... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Munich_Security_Conference_and_the_World_Order.php What happened on 14 February 2025 at the 61st Munich Security Conference? Instead of taking the stage to rally European nations against Russia as expected, US Vice President JD Vance went in a completely different direction, criticising them for their lack of democracy and loss of their (truly) liberal values. Apart from a lot of noise in the mainstream media, mostly expressing anger and outrage at Vance's "unfounded" criticism, we haven't heard any clear voices telling us why this happened... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Teaching_Plato.php When I was a sophomore in college, I took a course that was required for the philosophy major: the History of Ancient Philosophy. The course is pretty standard—a survey class that covers the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle. Sometimes St. Augustine (though he is sometimes included in a course on Medieval Philosophy). The History of Ancient is for philosophy majors what calculus is for math majors, or Microeconomics is for economics majors... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Burying_the_Mystery_The_Grave_of_Edgar_Allen_Poe.php For eighty years, on January 19, Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday, an unknown visitor would drink a toast on the site marking the place that was determined as his original grave, and then leave the bottle of Martell cognac and three roses. Sometimes he left cryptic notes as well. He was rumored to be dressed in black, his face obscured by a white scarf, and carrying a silver-tipped cane, but has not appeared in recent years. In memory of this ceremony, someone has placed life-like flowers and a plastic raven on this spot... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/A_Romp_through_Ruefleland.php 'I don’t know where to begin' Mary Ruefle says, with a kind of Beckettian humor in the opening lines of the title lecture from her enthralling prose collection, Madness, Rack, and Honey, and in doing so allows the reader to feel, with a delightful, induced bewilderment, his or her exact plight at the end of a post-modern era jam-packed with high-tech information and the resulting burden of What to say now?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Elizabeth_Bishop_Labor_of_Love_North_Haven.php Elizabeth Bishop’s best friend, Robert Lowell, died of a heart attack in September 1977, at the age of sixty. For Bishop, it was a terrible blow. She had met Lowell thirty years earlier and had taken to him immediately. Over the years, while rarely living in the same place, they visited one another and kept close by writing letters—carrying on one of the great correspondences of the twentieth century. They had much in common: both only children; both prone to problems with alcohol and depression; both with complicated, often tragic, love lives; and both consumed by an incandescent love for poetry... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Kafka_teaches_me_how_to_teach_Kafka.php One of the many unexpected treasures of teaching Kafka is the fact that Kafka himself gives us many clues about how he is to be taught and studied. In all of his novels and in many of his short stories and parables too, the figures of teachers and students are frequent and critical interlopers... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/What_is_wrong_with_populism.php Who, other than Augeas, objected when, in a single day, Hercules cleaned out the Augean stables? A mighty pile of cattle dung had been festering there for more than thirty years. Augeas was infuriated because he had promised Hercules one tenth of his cattle if the job was finished in one day. He refused to honour the agreement, so Hercules understandably slayed him... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Hieronymus_Bosch_North_and_South_of_the_Alps.php Few indeed are the artists who, over the course of the years, have enjoyed the levels of fame, admiration, allure, but also astonishment that were prompted by the work of the Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch. Who was he? What do we know about him and his artistic production? But most of all: why this incredible notoriety for a painter who lived more than five centuries ago on the outskirts of the Habsburg Empire?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Individual_Terror_in_the_Faustian_Age.php The number of terrorist attacks has dramatically risen in the modern age1. It is no longer Gavrilo Princip flinging a bomb in Sarajevo, or Stalin robbing a bank... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Coincidence_of_Opposites_Winston_Churchill_and_Neville_Chamberlain.php Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain were two British politicians in the 1930s and 40s who were often considered as opposites. The former is viewed as the triumphant leader of Britain against Adolf Hitler, the latter, an appeaser who pandered to evil. However, the two men were not only opposites in character and policy, they may have also been complementary beings that could not have fulfilled their roles one without the other. This ‘coincidence of opposites’, of qualities and roles in stark contrast, exists within each man, between them, and in a kind of reconciliation where both are seen to serve a larger pattern... https://themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Book_of_Revelation_does_not_belong_in_the_Bible.php The last book in the New Testament, Revelation, is remarkably popular today. Few people read Revelation itself, but millions have read a book series called Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Books seven and eight in the series (The Indwelling and The Mark) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. The Remnant began at number one on the Times best-seller list (2002). Roughly 65 million copies have been sold in over forty languages, though only in America has it become a publishing phenomenon... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Teaching_Milosz_The_Evolution_of_a_Poet.php I first met Cezlaw Milosz in 1980, shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize. He came to Colby College -- where I was teaching -- as part of a tour publicizing his new book of poems. I introduced him at his reading and lecture, and served as one of his hosts at a faculty dinner. “Served” is probably an accurate description of my experience: he never learned anyone’s name, and to my recollection never asked anyone a question: he simply pontificated, highlighting his own importance... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Thought_of_an_Ars_Poetica.php What is bigger, space or countlessness? Atomic droplet? Leap of miles? A single foot of fire? Sometimes the query makes a quarrel from an equability.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Sky_Inside_the_Fence.php My childhood getaway was always in the way. It was the fourth step up, out of a case of six. And that step mattered. Every step was different, because of woodgrain, windows and particularities of altitude: at neither top nor bottom. And in the larger scheme of things, whether horizons are considered vertical or horizontal (duh), such preferences are liminal. Both literally and figuratively, I felt at home when I was neither here nor there... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Lorraine_Shemesh_On_Balance.php On balance, the visual world has anchored and propelled me. Making art requires time, perseverance, invention, and strength, but the beauty it provides can be restorative. Along with the formal elements wrestled with during the working process, there are powerful emotional components engaged, and endless possibilities generated... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Aphorism_as_a_Laboratory_of_Thinking.php The aphorism, a captivating literary genre, embodies the principle of 'the greatest in the smallest.' Its inherent paradox lies in the interplay between the broadest scope of generalization and the conciseness of its structure... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Case_of_Percy_Bysshe_Shelley.php If we agree with the assumption that few people actually read poetry, then what are the criteria which keep certain poets on the tip of every educated tongue?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Ruptures_and_Self_Renewal_in_The_Life_of_Kierkegaard.php Kierkegaard’s “fear and trembling” path of discovery raises many awkward questions about the true nature of the Self... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Symbiotic_Realism.php In a world teeming with conflict and upheaval, the ancient wisdom of Thucydides rings startlingly true today: 'The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.' Too often, those in power place self-interest above ethical considerations, leaving the powerless to endure the consequences... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Conversation_with_Frank_Jackson.php Mary’s Room is infamous, the stuff of philosophical legend. It is one the most famous thought experiments ever, designating Frank Jackson as one of the most influential philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. It has spilled considerable ink, with more than a thousand research papers published on it alone. But what is it and why is it so influential and controversial?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_New_Crusade.php The warped scruples of the campaign against Israel frequently rest on an unsavoury brew of mendacity and hypocrisy. Whatever the alleged transgressions of Israel’s military, or the provocative violence of extremist settlers, it is contemptible that the scourge of antisemitism should, in the twenty-first century, resurface in the guise of defending human security. Especially in the face of increasing geopolitical turbulence, the frailty of freedom is ignored at our peril. This disturbing moral paralysis portends dark days ahead that endanger justice and virtue everywhere... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Humans_Free_God_Slaves_Or_Neurological_Robots.php Despite worldwide disagreements over the ages, nearly everyone has agreed on one thing: our most fundamental life desire is happiness which itself depends on freedom. But whether man is truly free or not– collectively and/or individually -- has been one of history’s most contentious questions. In the West, the debate has evolved in four stages: the ancient and biblical, the theological medieval, the philosophical humanist, and the modern existential and neurological... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Political_Footnotes_to_Eusebius.php Over the years there has been much Christian preaching against the folly and wickedness of loving man more than God, of doing things for man’s sake and not for God’s, of believing that men could and should improve their lot without reference to God. On balance, such preaching has done much to prolong injustice, cruelty and suffering. It has also done much to bolster up the Powers that Be... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Odradek.php In 1919 Franz Kafka (1883-1924) published a short story called 'Die Sorge des Hausvaters' ['The Cares of a Family Man']. It’s one of Kafka’s shortest pieces, but it is emblematic of the endless, malleable, interpretive, and hard-to-pin-down quality of his writing... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/On_Paul_Celan.php Celan’s life is inseparable from the fate of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. The Shoah is indisputably the central event around which both the life and the work turn: he is a survivor of Khurbn... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Life_in_the_Studio_Lani_Irwin.php What is it called, the membrane that holds an eye within the socket? Is it the sclera, the outermost portion of the eye that contains cartilage? Only the first seagull skull I found when walking on the beach in Provincetown had such a form intact, feeling more as if the dead could see, a form within the form. I carried three small skulls back to Washington D.C. in 1973. That first seagull skull was the beginning of my life as the painter that I am. I placed it on a small, plain wooden crate and began to paint, studying the colours, shapes and forms. My formal studies for my M.F.A. were finished and I needed to teach myself to paint, find my own voice... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Psychology_of_Jouissance.php I hear you— 'Jouissance! Now you’re making up words!' Well, you’re kind of right, but, doggone it—I don’t have much choice. Do I? There’s really no word that captures the qualities at issue. Is there?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Last_and_First_Romantic.php A Secular Age was Taylor’s diagnosis, but in Cosmic Connections he offers a prescription. Across almost six-hundred pages Taylor presents an erudite compendium of arguments and close readings, but many will be familiar with the rather archaic (though by no means inaccurate) form of the philosopher’s claim – that the means of connection, meaning, and transcendence in a disenchanted world must be fundamentally aesthetic, that they must be poetic... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Philosophy_Between_Science_and_Mysticism.php It’s often said that the first philosopher was Thales of Miletus, born in the 7th century BCE. His big idea was that everything is made of water. In hindsight, this is not such a good idea. Even watermelon is only 92% water. But there’s actually a very profound thought in Thales’ idea. To wit: although the world seems like it’s made of so many different things, of all different colors and shapes and sizes and consistencies, behind this appearance of baffling multiplicity lies a hidden unity. Deep down reality is one – even though appearance is multiform. It’s this insight that earns Thales his status as the first philosopher, not the bit about water... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Kohlhaas_of_the_Academy.php Kafka’s favorite work of fiction was a novella by the German philosopher-poet Heinrich von Kleist, whose genius has been largely forgotten in the Anglophonic world. Named after its titular character, Michael Kohlhaas tells the story of an upright and uniformly respected horse trader living in Brandenburg during the time of Luther... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Fiction/A_day_in_the_desert_unlike_any_other.php The day he shot the helicopter down, Ali Obeid was sniping at angels. It had been a season of strange events... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Turkey_Other_Genocide_Letter_from_Diyarbakir.php If there is any truth in the adage that 'there are no winners in war' it is confirmed in the case of undeclared wars—those waged not against a foreign force or legitimate army but a people themselves. The costs of the Sayfo to the Armenian and Syriac-speaking Christians were material in lives and property—both of which can recover, over time, devastating though they were. The cost to Turkey was the loss of the multireligious character that the Ottoman Empire had managed for centuries, unjust and deeply flawed as it was, and one hundred years later it has never recovered... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Jewish_Stories_Translated_from_18_Languages.php The book welcomes the reader with a cover image depicting an abstract industrial mosaic, an elegant graphic in which some might see a landscape. It reminds me of subway design. A few colorful tiles are missing, naked cement peering from below. What platform are we on? New York? London? Toronto? What is the destination of the journey?.. https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Alternative_histories_of_Jesus.php Each of the 4 stories challenges the divinity of Jesus. Each imagines Jesus as merely mortal, though one isn’t sure while wishing he were. The Last Temptation of Christ, probably the most well-known, I read in college. The novel has Jesus imagining that he was a man who chose life over sacrifice. This fantasy turns out to be the Devil’s work. This misses the point of Christ’s dual nature... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/I_would_prefer_not_to.php In 1965 my friend decided to take a day off school and visit the grave of Herman Melville. Melville was just coming back into style as a great American writer, and my friend had become enamored of the nautical world of the novels. Wishing to pay tribute to that great author, and having learned from Melville how important navigation was, he planned his route from Brooklyn to Woodlawn cemetery in the Bronx, and took the train uptown, sure the rest would be easy... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Milton_in_the_Anthropocene.php 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 hot Mexican sun, was as if a desert mirage, a chimera, an illusion... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Life_in_the_Studio.php Our intentions are informed by knowledge and desire, subject to the best of our abilities, and also by our limitations. I see my limitations as part of my identity as a painter. In the making of paintings, I have the confidence that I lack in many other things. These paintings are carefully rendered, to a degree realistic, while at the same time they are altogether invented images with all manner of visual distortions or unreality. For me it would be boring and almost pointless to render a fully formed study on a canvas... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Franz_Kafka_on_Redemption_Conspiracy_and_Community.php If we look at Franz Kafka’s writings from the perspective of political theory, it seems that the politics he offers us, if any, are those of passivity, failure and doom. When his friend Max Brod asked Kafka if there was any hope, Kafka famously replies 'Oh there is, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.'... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Laura_Ann_Reed_To_Kafka.php Like a personal myth, an image within us. The half-hidden castle... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Backlight_Technology_Against_Evil.php Man is locked in his physical and digital cell, blinded by the lights, as the singer sings, with that deep, Kafkaesque, not fully conscious sense of being completely alone in a 'cold and empty city of sin,' with no one around to judge him,' but in fact only alone and judged. Judged not by people like him - that wouldn't solve the problem of evil - but by technology, an increasingly autonomous creature of the human mind... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Is_there_a_Religious_Message_to_Kafka_The_Castle.php Such an artist as Franz Kafka, for all of the bleakness of his landscape, is a Heideggerian 'shepherd of Being' who by the very resoluteness with which he plunges us into the Dark precipitates us out of our forgetfulness. In some paradoxical way our being deprived of the Transcendent brings us into proximity to its Mystery. This is not to gainsay those who deny the presence in Kafka’s work of any sort of affirmative religiosity. To what extent, after the full stringency of Kafka’s nihilism has been acknowledged, can nihilism itself be appropriated as a discipline of purgation? That is the question. It’s one of the most important questions to ask about the most representative literature not just of our time and place, but of all times and all places.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/To_Translate_Nelligan.php The challenge and reward of formal poetry do not lie in mastery of the formal aspects alone. They certainly are a matter of craftsmanship, but unless they serve a subject, they never amount to artistry. And mastery requires not only achieving the numbers, but achieving them with the appearance of inevitability: without tortured syntax, unnatural diction, and so on... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Augusto_Del_Noce_and_Transhumanism.php With the publication of Francis Bacon's 1620 'Novum Organum' ( New Tool)1 there began the Enlightenment march towards the 'singularity'. It entailed a belief in empiricism and scientific knowledge. It began what Francis Fukuyama would label as 'the world's most dangerous idea': Transhumanism... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Russian_Democracy_the_Russian_State_and_the_Russian_Nation.php In the 1996 presidential election campaign, Russian President Boris Yeltsin asked the Russian people to reconstitute themselves as a democratic people with a Western orientation. Since his first election in 2000, current Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked the Russian people to reconsider that identity and to reconstitute themselves once again as a powerful nation with interests distinct from those of the West. He has done this primarily through redefinition of the foundational terms of Western-style democracy, beginning with the term 'democracy' itself... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Rhetorical_Use_of_Historical_Analogy_in_Putin_Crimea_Speech.php During the night of February 21/22, 2014, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich fled to Russia from the violent protests in Kiev against his government. Less than one week later, on February 27, 'little green men'—barely camouflaged Russian army troops—seized control of Crimea, a predominantly Russian-speaking peninsula in southern Ukraine that borders the Black Sea. Shortly thereafter (March 18, 2014), Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a joint session of the Federal Assembly in Moscow to justify annexation of the Crimean region into the Russian Federation... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Rebel_with_a_Cause_The_Contributions_of_Maria_Arbatova.php In the 1990s, Maria Arbatova emerged from the rubble of the former Soviet Union as one of the leading and most outspoken feminists in the early post-Soviet women’s movement. In fact, it is safe to say that it was largely due to her efforts that the words 'feminism' and 'feminist' gained new-found legitimacy in early post-Soviet Russia---words that had been stigmatized as a female 'abnormality' during the Soviet period, a time when official propaganda alleged that gender equality had been established and that the women’s question had been “solved.” Arbatova is also a feminist writer, talk show host, and politician... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Paulina_Olowska_on_Patrol.php Completed in 2020, Romania stands nine feet tall, six feet wide. The scene, a nocturne. A marble column marks the right edge; at the left, a leafless tree scratches the evening sky. Bookended by these elements, a pair of dogs and a young woman patrol the center. A young woman? Consider the phenomenon: after decades (make that centuries) of seeing themselves portrayed in paintings by countless male artists, with little opportunity or encouragement to pick up a brush of their own, today, female artists are supported more equitably than ever before, are freer to paint as they wish than ever before. What do women painters choose to paint? The short answer: to paint young women. That is the single most preferred subject matter, by far.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Buried_in_God.php Every religion is a form of spiritual socialism. The irony is that the collectivist belief of billions is based on the original vision and path of a divine individualist – Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad... https://themontrealreview.com/Articles/Teaching_Walt_Whitman.php I once had a conversation in Beijing with a group of Chinese poets who complained about the oppressive weight of writing in a 10,000-year-old literary tradition. They felt the Chinese tradition was hostile, given the great achievements of those 10,000 years, to innovation and new generations of poetry. They were envious of the friendlier, iconoclastic tradition of American poetry, always looking to future writers for innovation and a re-examination of the past. Specifically, we were talking about Emerson and Whitman, both of whom suggest that by rebelling against them future generations will extend their influence... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Gaza_When_the_Cost_of_War_Is_Much_More_Than_Lives.php In better times, and there were better times, diners would file into the Al Salam Abu Haseira fish restaurant near sunset to feast on plates of shrimp, grouper, sardines, sea bream, and anything else Gaza’s fishermen would haul in from the sea—given the restrictions on the distance from the shore they were allowed to fish—monitored by the Israeli military. If grouper were aplenty the kitchen would whip up its specialty, zibdiyeh, a tomato-based stew made with pine nuts, herbs, tahina, shrimp, and heavy doses of hot pepper, onions, and lemon. Before the first intifada, in 1987, the tables were often packed with tourists, along with the occasional Israelis who would venture into the Strip for a rare taste of Palestinian cuisine... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Where_Have_All_the_Corinthians_Gone.php A spirit of goodness haunts the Earth. Never quite dominant, never quite disappearing, always beloved... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Anil_Seth_on_the_Hard_Problem_of_Consciousness.php How could any kind of physical processing give rise to any kind of experience, any rich life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. So I like this formulation of the hard problem. It basically presupposes a kind of view of the universe where there is stuff, a kind of materialist starting point, and then asks how and why is consciousness part of that picture? To me, that includes the second version of the way you put it, which is: okay, then how and why is it that some things are conscious and other things are not? And of course, opinions on that will vary depending on your metaphysics... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Fruit_of_the_Vine.php During the Middle Ages, the southern region of Spain, Andalusia, was a magical place. Known as Al-Andalus in Arabic, it was renowned for its religious tolerance, scientific and philosophical advances, orderly, well-lit cities, and splendid architecture, such as the Mosque of Cordoba and the Al Hambra palace. Like its more commercial cousin, California, with which it shares a beneficent Mediterranean climate, the Andalus is remembered as a land of eclectic invention and pluralism... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Pale_Horse_of_Olympic_Ceremony.php One Friday night, over the dark tides of the Seine, the river that cuts through the body of Paris, the ancient city of Catholic and secular faith, a metal horse with a rider on it appeared. It came from the Pont d'Austerlitz, galloping toward the Eiffel Tower. Water poured out that night, as rain from above, as a river from below... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Grey_Matter.php Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/James_Wilson_and_Paul_Willetts_on_The_Pieces.php I must admit that I’m not one of those people who’s obsessed by 1960s music, yet I was immediately captivated by The Pieces, which portrays the brief career and mysterious life of a fictional late 1960s British folk singer... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Dostoyevsky_Solution_to_Kant_Problem.php In Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason, Kant posited the existence of a radical evil within the soul and thereby, according to Goethe, 'criminally sullied his philosopher’s cloak with a shameful taint'. He also transformed our whole approach to the problem of evil, whether as an ugly ditch, standing between man and his creator, or the practical problem of surmounting the evil each individual faces in his or her consciousness, in his or her relations with others and his or her world... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Problem_of_Evil_Will_Not_Go_Away.php 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. Central to that question has been a preoccupation with ultimate evil, the manner in which absolute and metaphysical malignancy has been represented across the Abrahamic traditions, and in the modern world... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/How_new_is_the_New_Testament.php How is it that the Old Testament (OT) seems to predict the coming of Christ? Was the OT inspired by the God revealed in the New Testament (NT)? Could be, but an answer internal to the Bible itself is persuasive... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/From_Fame_to_Folly_The_Origins_of_Political_Demoralization.php Tension between the people and their leaders is a theme in democratic history because it is rooted in human nature. Large groups of people ('The People') can be fickle. Recognition of this condition preoccupied the signers of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to tie government purposes to a protection of 'natural rights' of individual liberty. So, too, did the Framers of the Constitution, who wanted to insulate subsequent generations from the unceasing struggles of 'factions'—struggles that immediately after the Revolution, under the Articles of Confederation, had nearly destroyed the nation... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Parthenon_Wars.php As history’s pendulum swings once again, ominously, towards the political far-right, the iconic, enduring symbols of democracy take on a fresh significance... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Modernity_in_Rousseau_Audial_Self.php Psychology urges that we are never so authentic as when we encounter the self; philosophy counsels that we are never so modern as when we ponder the self. Might one then speak of a perspective that sees the self as both authentic and modern? These two disciplines seem to speak with two distinct voices. And the insistence of early twenty-first century society on specialization seems to encourage the segregation of one from the other. Indeed, we live in a culture that accords status only to the specialist as knowing, from medically coded ailments devised by behemoth insurance companies to relief pitchers summoned to dispatch one - and only one - batter in a game of baseball. The specialist or, better, the subspecialist, controls destiny... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Fabricating_Dreams_Ando_Tokutaro_Utagawa_Hiroshige.php In the early 1830s the owner of the small-scale publishing house Hōeidō in the Nihonbashi area of Edo (Tokyo), Takenouchi Magohachi, met with Andō Tokutarō -aka Utagawa Hiroshige-, an unconventional amateur artist from the samurai class. We can only imagine how the two set their plan out for the most formidable series ever printed in Japan: the 53 stations of the Tokaido. In fact, little did they know that with this series, conceived originally as a profitable venture, they would firmly establish landscape as a major genre in Japanese print-making, which till then had focused on portraits of actors and beautiful women.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Kafka_Remains_the_Jewish_Prophet_of_Oblivion.php Kafka, who perished from the tuberculosis that had reduced him to a quiet whisper of a human a hundred years ago, endures as the iconic author of modernity, the variable conscious cipher for the twentieth-century’s dislocations and alienations, traumas and horrors, and most of all its absurdity... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Poetry_by_Alan_Altany.php Transitory beauty aches... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/On_Tranquillity_of_Mind.php It was late before I received your letter, wherein you make it your request that I would write something to you concerning the tranquility of the mind, and of those things in the Timaeus which require a more perspicuous interpretation. ... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Writing_the_Self_Foucault.php Self-writing clearly appears here in its complementary relation to anchoritism; it offsets the dangers of solitude; it exposes what one has done or thought to a possible gaze; the fact of being obliged to write fills the role of companion by inciting human respect and shame. One can thus posit a primary analogy: that which others are to the ascetic in his community the notebook will be to him in his solitude.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Fiction/Son_of_Terah_Fiction_by_Jessalyn_LeBlanc.php He hasn’t mentioned a child in years. Not since we got the farm and the linen tablecloths and the cattle with their promise of riches. Not since that first September, when the wheat bloomed in abundance. Not since that night against the oil lamp’s unsteady flame when we came to the synchronous and silent understanding that I would not bring a baby into this world... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Music_of_The_Devil_1955.php They called my generation of teenagers 'juvenile delinquents' – mainly because of our'wild and crazy' music. Drugs weren’t a major problem in the mid-1950’s, and the 'sexual revolution' hadn’t started. I’m not saying we didn’t think about sex – we sure did, a lot – but the 'respectable' girls knew how to say NO – at least with me... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Gary_Soto_Pilgrimage.php In the brief essay 'Catholics,' from his first book of nonfiction, Living Up the Street (1985), prolific Chicanx poet and author Gary Soto depicts himself as an elementary school student in a parochial school 'standing in a waste basket for fighting on the day we received a hunger flag for Biafra'... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/George_Kennan_A_Voice_of_Reason.php It is hard to explain why George Kennan's voice was heard and proved right when he wrote the Long Telegram in 1946 and helped shape the post-World War II world, and then was left almost unnoticed when he wrote a short letter in the New York Times after the fall of the Soviets (just as he predicted) in 1997, at the end of the Cold War. Why was Kennan right and heard for the fall of the Soviets and not right and heard for the expansion of NATO? https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Bernard_Stiegler_Elements_of_Pharmacology.php I think it is extremely important to understand that the accidents, the toxicities, the diseases, our wounds, can also be sources of invention, creativity, maybe even of the most brilliant ideas. So, from all the intoxication, all the misuse of pharmaka, we may also learn - and progress and practice pharmacology together... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Death_Divinity_and_Dreams.php The human brain specializes in figuring things out. But, after thirty thousand years of homo sapiens inquiry, countless cosmic mysteries remain – God, gravity, the electron, black holes, dark matter, etc. Not least of all, we have yet to understand the instrument of our understanding: the mind itself and its two dimensions: Consciousness and Unconsciousness... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Pharmakon_Culture_and_Reality.php Has culture ever been separated from practical life? Culture has different forms: high culture, mass culture, national culture, local culture, family culture, political culture, Christian culture, secular culture, and so on. Culture is the form of practical life. And practical life is the living substance of culture... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Reading_Solzhenitsyn_for_the_First_Time.php I first read The Gulag Archipelago during my first year in Israel, where I eventually settled. I remember feeling that here was something powerful and new... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Village_of_the_Waterwheels.php The village of the waterwheels, Lao Tzu and a minor epiphany in Moscow all speak of one thing, a glimpse into a future where people are satisfied with less, and yet what is lived is infinitely richer in texture and colour than we often experience today. We will have come full circle from conquering nature, red in tooth and claw, to a return into its heart with more complete knowledge about our purpose here, and the fulness of being a human being. We will be comfortable in our own skin... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Searching_for_Certainty.php Cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Over and over again. Descartes was driven to the extremity of his wits, desperate to prove to himself that the external world existed, and that such certainty came with a sense of personal agency within that world. Once again, he fell back on Plato’s allegory of the cave: not for him is that which is what it appears to be! https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/How_Philip_Larkin_Cuts_So_Deep.php Fear of mortality, the fragility of relationships, the beauty lurking in the everyday. These are common themes in modern poetry — cliches, even. Yet in the hands of a master poet, they feel vibrant and fresh. Such was the skill of Philip Larkin, a defining poet of the 20th Century. But to truly appreciate that skill, we need to lean close to Larkin’s techniques and process... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/What_do_we_owe_animals.php For most of human history our conceit has ordained that animals exist for us, to do with them as we please. We employ them for sport, entertainment, experiments, and work; their lives are crushed by inhumane methods of slaughter, transport, battery farming, and more. Their legal status in most countries differs little from a chair or a table... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/To_Deal_with_Inequality_It_Must_Be_Better_Understood.php Extreme inequality is the sometimes mentioned but not well seen elephant in the room. Mostly noted and then ignored, it continues its 45-year explosion, especially in the US and UK without pause or concerted opposition. How extreme is it?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Four_Poems_from_Ovid_Creek_Sam_Magavern.php What we cannot speak about we must indicate with sighs, shouts, grunts, tears, and shrieks... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Edith_Stein_and_the_State.php It was not as a student of philosophy that I learned about Edith Stein. The luminous books she wrote as a phenomenologist and a Christian metaphysician did not figure in any of my academic courses. Rather, on my way to work one morning, I chanced across her religious name, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, on a bronze memorial plaque inside Our Lady of Victory Church in downtown Manhattan. Identified as a 'Gift of the Edith Stein Guild,' the plaque stated, 'Her Calvary was Auschwitz.'... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/How_Humour_Laid_the_World_Bare_from_the_Sixteenth_Century_to_the_Present.php Homer’s gods can roar with laughter. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and the rest of the cabal — grinning, giggling, splitting their sides. Anything man can do, the gods can do better. The Greek pantheon is a projection of the terrestrial on to the celestial. It’s only when God becomes man that he stops laughing. Jesus doesn’t do stand-up. There are no gags in the Bible, no guffaws or gales of laughter. The Christian faith is an awfully serious thing... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Political_Theology_of_International_Order.php Many books have been, are, and will be written on the subject of international relations. But not many, at least not today, would discuss international order and our perceptions of it from a political-theological point of view. One of the few titles that offers such a discussion is William Bain's The Political Theology of International Order... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Nina_Berberova_and_Simone_de_Beauvoir.php Nina Berberova was unhappy whenever her Italics Are Mine was called a memoir. She would insist that her book was an autobiography—and not merely insist but do everything in her power to cement this specific genre definition in the reader’s consciousness. The word “autobiography” is in the subtitle of Italics, and the first sentence of the first chapter also says that “this book is not reminiscences” and explains in detail wherein the difference lies between the two genres... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Wild_Gods_of_Barbara_Ehrenreich_and_William_James.php Better known for her books on low-wage workers, such as Nickled and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her dissertation on cellular immunology, and had always considered herself a scientist, even as she began to write on social issues. Author of about twenty books, the one that breaks the pattern is among her last, Living with a Wild God, in which she writes about an encounter with god, an event for which she was unprepared... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/On_Life_and_Its_Evolution.php Science, philosophy, and culture – are these separate magisteria, or can there be beneficial cross-fertilization? This question may be considered almost as old as civilization itself... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Veils_of_Distortion.php Anyone who’s followed the news for decades has noticed without fail that coverage has tilted more and more towards stories about celebrities and all manner of trivial conflicts between members of the public. What was once the sole domain of what we call 'tabloid' news has spread to become a fixture of most mainstream news outfits.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/For_the_Posthumous_Garcia_Marquez_Novel_Now_On_Its_Way.php I am called back to the too little acknowledged problem of adult/minor sex in the works of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/They_Shall_Reap_the_Whirlwind.php She spoke as to a child who could not understand. All the futility that lay ahead. Yet who she knew would go on to repeat. Repeat repeat the things men had to learn.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/What_Ever_Happened_to_Joel_Kupperman.php I’ll never forget that day in 1944 - it was extremely warm for November – people called it 'Indian Summer' – but I didn’t see any Indians. It was the day I saw Joel Kupperman at school. He was in a hallway carrying books - alone. We were walking toward each other - face to face. This was my chance to introduce myself, but I was too scared to speak to the most famous kid in America (at least since Shirley Temple - but she wasn’t very famous anymore). It was an exciting moment, but I froze... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Reflections_on_Death_and_the_After_Death.php What happens after we die has always been a major source of religious speculation, and providing answers to this question has also been one of religion’s chief tasks. Many faiths use the fear of death and the lure of an afterlife as a sort of spiritual club to dun adherents into proper moral behavior and correct belief in this world, promising all sorts of things to the worthy righteous after death. Pragmatically speaking, this promotes a very positive outcome, but how does one verify the benefit package?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Rejuvenating_Communism.php This book is a study of ambitious young Chinese, their aspirations, and career choices. It was prompted by an initial puzzle: how does the Chinese party-state manage to attract recruits and maintain their commitment over time, when ideology does not structure recruitment anymore and a liberalized employment market provides alternative career options? These issues are central to our understanding of what contributes to the long-term resilience of non-democratic regimes and their ability to remain attractive to educated young people... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_quest_for_the_historical_Jesus.php Is Jesus Christ best understood as a prophet of the apocalypse? Yes, argued Albert Schweitzer in 1906 in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Moderns, said Schweitzer, tend to miss this reality, turning Jesus into a wise and pacific God-man. Schweitzer’s claim has been renewed and popularized by Bart Ehrman in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. It’s a strong argument, though a complicated one, for there exists no history of Jesus without its own theological agenda.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Philosophical_Cases.php Philosophy usually does without cases, dealing only with principles, ideas, laws, and universals. However, as modern science is inclined to believe, it is chance that lies at the foundation of the world. According to Niels Bohr, and contrary to Albert Einstein, God does play dice – in particular, the “dice” of quanta. The most precise of the sciences that deal with the fundamentals of the universe, quantum physics, is built on chance and probability. Why shouldn’t philosophy, too, take up chance? Let's give chance a chance!... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Descartes_Dreams.php 'In dreams,' said Delmore Schwartz, 'begin responsibilities. This is nowhere truer than in the case of René Descartes (1596-1650), whose dreams committed him without reserve to the life of the mind... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Fiction/Resistance_2_0.php I should have picked the bench. I mean, the fellow in the maroon uniform gave me the option once I was unceremoniously pulled inside the vehicle. 'Bench or Bar,' he offered matter of factly and I, having no idea what he was talking about, chose 'Bar'. Now, I find myself handcuffed with four other forlorn gents to an overhead handlebar in a van clearly once used to shuttle airline passengers between the rental car parking lot and their flight terminal. In fact, if one looked closely, you could still see the faint outline of the red Avis name under the van’s now painted over greyness.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/The_Inexplicable_Hands_of_Ravenna_Poems.php Only the hands remain, open palms in prayer, ghost hands visible on Corinthian pillars.... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Religious_Aspects_of_America_Commercial_Cults_of_Celebrity.php Under its content banner 'Psychology and Relationships', CNBC offered a first-person account posted on Wednesday 13 September 2023 from a woman who attended a Beyoncé event held in Las Vegas earlier in the month. The author confessed to having dropped just under $2,600 USD 'on tickets, travel and hotel' as the main ingredient of her 24th birthday celebration. With equal candor, she confessed: 'Never had a concert inspired me so much that I wanted to change my entire approach to life.'... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Lee_Oser_An_Interview.php There's a question nowadays among readers and writers of satire: does satire require, however implicitly, to reference a moral standard? For me as a satirist, that's what Catholicism does: it supplies an oasis of meaning in a wilderness of advertising... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/What_Does_Truth_Mean.php The struggle to speak true words requires perpetual irony, self-criticism, dialogue, and openness. I can aim for a good, unobstructed view of things without deluding myself that I am standing on a mountain peak. I can make a new start on truthfulness without thinking that I am beginning at the beginning. I can aspire toward truth without claiming to own it. I can participate as one voice in a conversation, open to persuasion... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Judging_Jerusalem_South_Africa_vs_Israel.php The apocalyptic scenes of privation and devastation in Gaza are medieval in their horror. Whether by accident or (more likely) foresight and design, Hamas has wrecked the lives of the people by whom they were elected. The scale of death and injury is a damning indictment of the callous indifference and cruelty of the jihadists whose well-heeled leaders are safely ensconced in five-star hotels or luxuriating in lavish spas. Provoking Israel by their atrocities of 7 October—murder, rape, torture, abduction, arson, and pillaging—the butchers have reaped a whirlwind whose calamitous consequences will endure for decades... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Godfather_of_Soft_Power.php One might well ask why Canadians would be interested in a memoir by a Harvard professor describing his personal and intellectual journey first as a student at Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard and then teacher, punctuated by several senior government appointments in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon. But they should. Though Nye never reached the apex of government to serve as National Security Adviser to the President or Secretary of State, his influence extended well above and beyond his pay grade. He will also forever be known as the godfather of "soft power,' a term that is now part of the standard lexicon of diplomacy... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Crucial_Need_for_a_Less_Mechanized_Life.php For a more truly diverse and integrated human state to come about, rooted in basic motivations and fired by the challenge of ever new horizons, we need lives that are simpler and yet richer – and societies and politics that are permissive of that goal. It is only in that context, shot through with culture, that a more profound satisfaction of being alive arises... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Mystery_of_The_Sabine_Wolf.php In bocca al lupo!‘Into the Wolf’s mouth’, as Italian idiom would have it, glib and edgy, street-modern to the hilt, belies its closet status as a literary fossil. Folklore traces its beginnings back two millennia arguably, to a single individual, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, infamous to all students of the Latinate language simply as ‘Horace’ — he of the hexametrical rhythm, at once daunting, sensuous, and nonetheless charming. The well-honed story, as it trickles down to us, embroidered no doubt through countless retellings, goes something like this... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Is_Western_Culture_Losing_Its_Mind.php No one would ever write in a clinical chart note, 'This patient is losing their mind. However, soundness of mind is a fundamental clinical, as well as a legal and financial, and perhaps cultural and social, issue. Why? Because... the life is guided by the mind. Therefore, individual and group survival depends on having a sound mind... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Two_Zen_Ink_Paintings_of_the_Thirteenth_Century.php These two thirteenth century ink paintings by Muqi would teach us to acknowledge and to appreciate the little things in life. And they also teach us to acknowledge and to appreciate our own life and life itself... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/An-Interview-with-Jean-Luc-Beauchard.php My writing is born from my reading... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Nina_Berberova_and_Robert_Oppenheimer.php Inherent to memoir and especially autobiographical prose is reverse perspective. Distant events come to the fore, imposingly, in all their more and less salient details, but as the story approaches the present, it becomes increasingly blurry, disjointed, and abbreviated, due not only to the well-known properties of human memory or the necessity of a certain distance for making sense of what has occurred but also to purely practical considerations that militate against touching on certain topics... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Frans_Hals.php Let’s start in the final room, at the end of the painter’s life, when he is eighty years old. Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House (about 1664) is a wonderful loan from the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, but a viewer has to reckon with its strangeness. Its six male figures suggest but stop short of being both a painting of lively camaraderie, or one of sombre formality. Take the central figure who tries out his Renaissance elbow, but finds hand on hip and arm akimbo generates little foreshortening. Also, the two men in hats on the right lack the animation of eyes and face Hals usually finds in his subjects. But interpreting painted expressions is always risky, so I keep looking back to see if it changes... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Age_of_Enoch_and_Metatron.php 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... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Unusual_Thoughts_Prompted_by_the_Hamas-Israel_War.php It is a curiosity of the human social DNA that we like to clump together in groups, be they ethnic, religious, ideological, or territorial. This thought came to me as I listened both to survivors of the Hamas massacres in Israel and to survivors of Israel’s bombings in Gaza... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/David_Wagoner_Poems_of_Performance.php Among the half dozen photographs featured in the gallery of the David Wagoner special issue that appeared 42 years ago for the now defunct Slackwater Review out of Lewiston, Idaho, you will find a picture of the late David Wagoner (dec. Dec. 18, 2021) on stage in the role of Falstaff from The Merry Wives of Windsor... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Letter_from_Istanbul.php 'Allahu akbar!' The repeated Arabic call to prayer that issues from the nearby mosque (‘cami’ in Turkish, ‘masjid’ in Arabic) is the first sound that I hear very early each pre-dawn morning. The modern mecca of Istanbul has been known historically as Byzantium, Constantinople, and Stamboul..." https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Weaponization_of_God_from_Moses_to_the_MAGA_Messiah.php After World War II, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, and others debated the problem of evil in the context of Holocaust Theology. When visiting Auschwitz where Wiesel had been imprisoned by the Nazis, Pope Benedict XVI said: 'In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: ‘Why, Lord, did You remain silent? How could You tolerate all this?’' Had the pontiff forgotten not only the wrathful Lord’s many Old Testament genocide orders to His prophets, but the merciless writings of the Church’s most influential rebel monk?... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Three_Poems_Ron_McFarland.php I confess, I scattered a small, hopeful handful of seeds for the newly fledged... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Obedience_to_Authority.php Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily overlooked as a subject of inquiry in social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of significant behavior cannot be understood. For an act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than action that is spontaneous... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Literary_Theory_Is_Not_Trauma_Theory.php It may come as a surprise to some, but trauma theory has become a leading analytic framework through which to analyze literary texts. Of course, literary theorists can and should use any framework they find useful. The problem is the confusion that has developed between literary trauma and psychic trauma. Theories of psychic trauma derived from literature have been applied to real trauma in an attempt to make sense of the suffering of actual people. The result is confusion and misunderstanding about how real trauma might be healed. Trauma is healed through care and love, values that have no place in literary trauma theory... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Emotional_Life_of_Populism.php Populist politics blends together four specific emotions – fear, disgust, resentment, and love. The mixture of these emotions forms the matrix of populism because they generate antagonism between social groups inside society and alienation from the institutions that safeguard democracy, and because they are, in many ways, oblivious to something we might call reality... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Must_We_Witness_to_Moral_Injury.php Over the last decade or so, psychologists have proposed a new concept that helps us understand the unique ways individuals may suffer after breaching their own ethical codes. That concept is called moral injury. The term was coined by Jonathan Shay in the 1990s, but contemporary specialists have significantly expanded on his narrow definition. Briefly, moral injury is the enduring psychic pain that may afflict someone who either commits or witnesses a significant moral transgression. It is similar to PTSD but manifests with a distinct symptom set and seems to require a novel suite of treatment strategies... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/To_Read_the_Bible.php I was confused when my tenth-grade English colleague began teaching various literary texts by first introducing four critical lenses. She felt students needed to understand how to interpret texts as they began to read and study them. As I saw it, this was more of an exploration of the lenses as they related to the works and less about the texts themselves. She believed her tenth graders should explore how an author had constructed gender stereotypes, expressed social class distinctions, used his/her unconscious desires and anxieties, and had understood political and economic oppression... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Jungian_Matrix.php The Matrix is the ultimate millennial sci-fi movie: it came out in 1999 and made cinematic history. What if we were, after all, living in a computer simulation? Almost a quarter of a century later, with algorithms and artificial intelligence controlling more of our world than ever before, The Matrix rings particularly true to our post-ChatGPT ears. The box office success of the 2021 Matrix Resurrections shows that the franchise is still going strong and captures the essence of our era. This should not be surprising: The Matrix is a Jungian movie that addresses the heart of our modern psychological struggles. In a machine-like world that has become too rational, human beings need to solve the riddle of the matrix to reach self-knowledge and recover their freedom... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/How_States_Think_The_Rationality_vs_the_Emotionality_of_Foreign_Policy.php ‘How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy’, a new book by John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato, is a well-written and insightful examination of a central question in international relations: are states actually rational actors? That is, does the empirical record show that they are routinely rational or routinely non-rational? The issue is crucial for both the study and practice of international politics and the authors make the case that “only if states are rational can scholars and policymakers understand and predict their behavior”. In this thought-provoking book co-authored over hundreds of Zoom meetings held predominantly during the Covid-pandemic, Mearsheimer and Rosato unpack how leaders think and how states jostle for expanded power and security. They do so by examining whether past and present world leaders have acted rationally in the context of momentous historical events, including both world wars, the Cold War, and the post–Cold War era, including the current Ukraine-Russia conflict... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Only_a_God_Can_Save_Us.php The modern occidental world, roughly from the Renaissance onwards, sprang from a secularisation of culture and its culmination is the main reason for the polarisation of the contemporary world. The modern phase of culture has seen an antinomy of opposite values squeezed together, like a nuclear fission, a building of energy and dissonance and spewing out its contents in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. This was the ambivalence of the Platonic- Christian world against the spectre of 'reason' raging like tectonic plates... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Personal_Operations_A_Guide_to_Living_Well.php Philosophy, social science, books, and magazines, as well as your mother and your next-door neighbor, all offer hints as to how to live well. There’s the Id, which you have to watch out for. And the Superego, which you also have to watch out for. There’s cognition, with its false beliefs and distortions. There’s decisions, with their merry-go-round approach-avoidance dilemmas. There’s behavior, which everyone can see, including the police and the town gossip. Then there’s good intentions, and 'best-laid schemes', which, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns pointed out, 'Gang aft agley', as you likely have said to yourself many times. And finally, there’s all those defensive stories you tell, to try to cover your tracks... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/War_Poems.php We moved mostly during the day. They moved at night. So we set our ambushes at night, and they during the day. https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Watergate_in_the_country.php Under threatening gray skies... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Wherefore_Art_Thou_Romeo.php Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, to create a monster they call Destiny. Heraclitus observed that if you sow a character, you inevitably reap one- a tyrant's authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure. ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων. Character is fate... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_History_of_Miami_Beach.php Miami Beach, Florida is one of the most well known resort cities in the world. However, during the 20th century this glitzy 'fun-in-the-sun' paradise was also a haven for elderly Jewish immigrants, many of whom had fled from Czarist Russia. It was also home for recent survivors of the Holocaust. They were easy to identify, always dressed in short sleeves, proud to display the numbers branded on their arm - but some wore long sleeves, even on the hottest days of summer, hiding a memory from hell... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Choosing_Life_After_Tragedy_and_Helping_to_Heal_the_World.php Perhaps it’s human nature to expect only good things in life however, as the Buddha taught, because of our attachments to people and things, life involves suffering and, sooner or later, one way or another, everyone experiences some degree of suffering. And when suffering hits, we usually feel it isn’t fair or right or justified... https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Appearance_of_Justice.php One of my students recently bemoaned the fact that I put Nietzsche on the syllabus. Yes, he is an important thinker, but nihilism is so tiresome. Life is hard enough. Why not give students a philosophy to live for? A colleague said much the same. 'Nietzsche the narcissist,' he called him. What does he have to offer besides an oversized ego and license to live as one pleases? I have fielded similar complaints when teaching Freud (dated! disproved! sexist!) and Camus (a psychotherapist I know recently recounted a story from his days as an intern: A college student came in after attempting to commit suicide. The cause? He was taking a course on existential philosophy. The treatment? Drop the class and burn his copy of The Myth of Sisyphus). Sartre sums up such critiques aptly: 'Others have condemned [existentialists] for emphasizing what is despicable about humanity, for exposing all that is sordid, suspicious, or base, while ignoring beauty and the brighter side of human nature. For example, according to Miss Mercier, a Catholic critic, we have forgotten the innocence of a child’s smile.' https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Higher-Education-and-the-Democratic-Ideal.php It is a collective belief these days that the university is in a state of crisis. The diagnosis of this crisis offered by pundits, economists, and by university administrators are not the interest of this essay; however, to state the case briefly, it is believed that degrees are out of sync with workplace expectations and, despite having never been more expensive, are of less value to employers... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Agape-Diplomacy-The-Power-of-Caring-Charisma.php Agape is an ancient Greek notion which goes something like this: get along with everybody; don’t make enemies; give at least as much as you expect to get; consider everyone kin, even if a tad distant. Oh, and you could dress up a bit; and try to be in a good mood; and be friendly—everyone likes those things; they bring out the best in others. An ancient term for this kind of attractive, genial generosity was charisma, derived from the more fundamental concept charity... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Paradox-of-China-Rise-and-the-Veneration-of-Mao.php The films of Zhang Yimou gave many Westerners our first and most vivid impressions of life in twentieth century China. The Frances Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg of Chinese filmmaking, Zhang started as a cinematographer in the early 1980s, and his love of the saturated colors of Kodachrome, then newly available in China, carried through his career. Red, especially. Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991) were novelistic works focusing on the difficult lives of peasants, especially women and children. Raise the Red Lantern, which is on every critic’s list of all-time classics, made a star of Gong Li, in the role of a young woman sold by her family to become the third wife of a rich merchant in pre-Communist times... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/John-Yoder-a-great-theologian-and-decades-of-sexual-assault.php John Yoder is not nearly as widely known as Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr. Yet, he is as significant as they, primarily because he politicizes Jesus in a convincing way. Christianity Today ranked Yoder's 'The Politics of Jesus' as the fifth most important religious book of the twentieth-century. He is a major influence on Stanley Hauerwas. Yoder is also a troubling character, having been accused by more than one-hundred women of sexual abuse... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/What-Thou-Lovest-Well-Remains.php When Ezra Pound moved to London in 1908, the person he most wanted to meet was W.B. Yeats, and he quickly befriended the great poet. During the daytime he taught Yeats how to fence; in the evenings, he read aloud to him. Yeats trusted Pound's taste enough to accept some of his editing suggestions; he said that although Pound was full of the Middle Ages, he helped him to modernize his verse... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Learning-From-Lockdown.php In 'After Lockdown,' the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour takes a radical stance: with the current pandemic, we experience a dress-rehearsal for what climate change has in store... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Philosophia_Ars_Vitae.php Our philosophies of life pervade all we do. The problem is not this or that approach but the day-to-day structure in which each approach is presented and considered. The current structure allows for a sphere free of concern about the meaning of life, a bifurcation of our selves into economic versus emotional, exploitative versus empathetic, body versus soul. We allow the humanities-the traditional repository of deeper wisdom about our condition and the art of living-to wither away. In their place remain only slogans and lists... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Godly-Citizens-Unholy-Politics-Retrieving-Some-Forgotten-Voices.php A pillar of our thinking today about 'The Good Citizen' and the place of social ethics in the public arena is the often hidden contribution made by religious thinkers, critics and advocates of liberal democracy. Augustine's 'City of God', Walter Rauschenbusch's 'Social Gospel', and Reinhold Niebuhr's 'Christian Realism' have given religious language and direction to American society: conservative, liberal, and radical. What are the civic virtues presented in this religious legacy that remain useful in judging the internal and global exercise of American power? https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-AI-we-trust.php The wish to know the future is as old as humanity. In all cultures around the globe our ancestors have consulted signs from the heavens and from nature, believing they could see or hear and interpret what they revealed about their destinies or which decision to take... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Many-Memes-of-Love.php 'Love is love' declares the sign on my neighbor's lawn. It is a generous sentiment, reminding us that love is valued no matter who loves whom, and regardless of how and why they love. Yet it contains a thousand complexities, not least because it joins the many contradictory memes that we repeat to ourselves about love... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-The-Best-Selling-Bible-Self-Help-Book-Ever.php Reviewing Bible-based self-help books gets old quickly, but Rick Warren's 'The Purpose Driven Life,' is so influential it's worth reading, if only to figure out why it's so popular. It's not new, but nothing new comes close in popularity and influence... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-End-of-Love-Illouz.php Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined to us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. To be in love is to become an adept of Plato, to see through a person an Idea, perfect and complete... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Free-as-a-Jew.php Writing (as writers know) is sometimes born of rage, and other times out of love or grief. Free as a Jew contains a mix of all three, but this time in relation not to an individual but to the Jewish people as a whole. 'Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past,' this book seems to be urging.'Let us not invest all our efforts in self-improvement while neglecting the need to protect ourselves.' https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Gideon-Rubin.php 'I think paintings are like poems. We take words that have a certain meaning but when you put them together - it’s a new meaning altogether. Painting is like that for me: it is that meeting of shapes, tones and colours - that’s where the magic happens...' https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Three-Poems-Paul-Rabinowitz.php Poetry and Photography https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Green-Treasure-Box.php We launched our raft onto the serene Klamath River on the Oregon side. We had parked Willy’s car at the takeout on the California side of the river, then taken the hour-plus-long shuttle ride back to the put-in spot... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-True-Meaning-of-Humanism.php Humanism is one of the great movements and also one of the great controversies in modern intellectual history. Let me begin with a broad definition: Humanism is the defense and promotion of human values and of human flourishing. Its goal is a more humane world. Progress toward that goal is to be achieved through reason, an ethics of human empathy, respect for human dignity, and human rights. Certainly the vast majority of humanists would accept that definition; many people share the same ideals, even those who do not normally call themselves humanists. Humanism can be defined even more simply: respect for human dignity, for the intrinsic and insuperable value of being human, for the principle that every person is an end-in-itself and ought never to be treated merely as a means. If we accept that definition, then humanism can claim an essential truth, perhaps even the essential truth... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Basic-Problems-of-the-Theory-of-Progress.php According to the so-called law of three stages (loi des trois états) established by Auguste Comte, humanity progresses in its development from the theological to the metaphysical understanding of the world, and from the metaphysical to the positive or scientific. Nowadays Comte’s philosophy has already lost credit, but even so his imaginary law is apparently a basic philosophical conviction in broad circles of Russian society. Yet this law represents a crude misunderstanding... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Desire-for-Oblivion.php As Homer recalls, wily Odysseus escapes from the cave of the Cyclops by poking out the monster’s solitary eye. The wounded Cyclops roars to the fleeing Greek: 'Who are you? Who can I say did this this to me?' Odysseus, skilled in all ways of contending, replies: 'Nobody. My name is Nobody.' When the Cyclops appeals to his fellow creatures for help in exacting revenge, they mock him. If Nobody poked out his eye, what is the problem? Thus did Odysseus make a name for himself by spurning names. His talent for evasion ensured his survival in human memory... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Three-Poems-Royal-Rhodes.php Three poems by Royal W.F. Rhodes https://themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Ape-Ethic-and-the-Question-of-Personhood.php It is easier to imagine apes as eco-engineers on a grand scale when we figuratively see them as forest persons and not as 'animals' or instinct-driven machines. I use the word person, therefore, in a much more metaphorical sense than others. Because of how they evolved, apes have an express and privileged right to their domains that humans do not have to that land. Apes are forest persons as most modern humans are village, town, or city persons... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Wyndham-Lewis-The-Intellectual-As-Artist.php For some decades the Wyndham Lewis Society has issued annuals of essays on Lewis’s philosophical and political views. A slew of books interpret his writings. Several biographies add to his two autobiographies. The profundity and variety of interpretations make any attempt to give a comprehensive picture of Lewis in a brief essay a herculean challenge... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Pandemic-A-Philosophical-Diagnosis.php Every epoch has a predisposition for a certain type of disease that becomes its symbol. Illness is not only a physiological phenomenon, but also a moral and historical one. In the postrevolutionary 1920s, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, who suffers from sclerosis of the heart vessels and will eventually die of a heart attack, explains the nature of his ailment: 'The disease of our time is one microscopic form or other of cardiac haemorrhage, brought on by a constant, systematic dissembling. It’s impossible, without its affecting your health, to show yourself day after day contrary to what you feel, to lay yourself out for what you don’t love, to rejoice over what brings you misfortune.... The great majority of us are required to have a constant, systematic crookedness of the soul.' Soviet propaganda and rising totalitarianism turned out to be not only socially oppressive but also medically dangerous. https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Primo-Levi-The-Flawed-Design.php Victor Brombert on Primo Levi, suicide, and survival. https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-are-novels-good-for.php Hidden deep in the unwritten past lies the origin of our love for a good story. Long before the invention of such technological marvels as clay tablets or parchment, nameless storytellers, relying solely on memory, beguiled their fellow tribe folk with gripping tales of danger, courage, and sacrifice. To satisfy this perpetual desire today, we turn largely to movies and — far less often — live theatre and novels... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Camus-Absurdism-Lacks-Imagination.php Camus insists that he is an absurdist, not an existentialist. OK, but it is important to figure out what he means. Camus thinks a Christian can be an absurdist. I don't. I do think that absurdism is the leading alternative not only to Christianity, but religion. Religion is said to be based on faith, as it is. Camus' absurdism is based on a particular heroic ideal, a man who faces the truth head on, as if it were that simple... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Spider-Shows-the-Way-Towards-Greater-Compassion-for-Animals.php One June night this summer, I encountered a wolf spider on the floor near my bed. This tiny animal had somehow wandered indoors; a rescue was clearly in order. That rescue turned out to be a fraught one, but after it I felt renewed determination to help animals caught up in agriculture and biomedical research... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Creation-Science-Makes-Sense-But-Fred-Alford.php Many Christians, and almost all adamant atheists, see creation science as a backdoor to sneaking God into school curricula, and public life generally. Among most educated people, creation science lacks respect. Wikipedia defines creation science as 'a pseudoscientific form of...creationism, which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible.' But what if we think about creationism more generally, as the claim that mind created the universe? Then it makes perfect sense, especially when you consider the alternatives: that the universe created itself, or that it has existed forever. 'Perfect sense' doesn't mean automatically true. It just means that it rests on a good argument. https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Toward-a-Joyful-Philosophy.php Shortly after birth, a baby has experienced life’s most basic joys: eating, embracing, moving, playing, and sleeping. Eating offers us the most intense possible integration with our world: we consume it, take it into our selves, decompose it, and convert it to more energy and life. When we die, the world will do the same thing to us – it will eat us – but while we live we eat the world. We chew, taste, savor, and (hopefully) call it good. But eating has a destructive side. When I eat a carrot, I eliminate it, destroy it, and turn much of it to waste. We offset these negative consequences by growing more food, but, as an existential model for how to relate to the world, eating may be too domineering... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Reading-Shilts-Reading-Camus-Reading-a-Plague.php Even before his narrative begins, Albert Camus offers a cue on how to read The Plague. He positions a statement by Daniel Defoe as the epigraph to the entire work. Any novelist writing about epidemics bears the legacy of A Journal of the Plague Year, the 1722 text in which Defoe recounts the collective story of one city, in his case London, under the impact of a plague, and uses a narrator so self-effacing that his only concession to personal identity is the placement of his initials, H.F., at the end... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Nuclear-Counterintuition-Risk-Reduction-During-the-Cold-War.php President Obama had made it clear in advance that he would not apologize, when he became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, in May 2016. His position followed that of eleven prior administrations and was vocally supported by China and Korea - Japan’s principal war victims - and many US veterans’ groups... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Chinese-Communist-Party-Anniversary.php Considered broadly, what kind of institution has the CCP become under Xi, and is it appropriate to a globally involved superpower? What Xi has systematically done is to turn the Party into a robotic machine, almost like a military, with rigid top-down discipline and little bottom-up or horizontal participation or feedback from society or Party members. This is a fundamental undoing of the type of responsive consultative Party which all of Xi’s predecessors since Deng had sought to build... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Spider-Shows-the-Way-Towards-Greater-Compassion-for-Animals.php In our particular time and place—Earth in the 21st century-it makes sense to consume as little meat, seafood, and dairy as each of us can manage. I’m not suggesting veganism is desirable or attainable for all people, but rather that all significant efforts matter. For one thing, we recognize those cows, chickens, goats, fish, and octopus as fellow travelers in a world alive with thinking and feeling beings. For another, eating plants is the single best thing any of us can do on a daily basis to mitigate the accelerating effects of global warming... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Invisible-Enemy-James-Jones-and-the-Politics-of-Grief.php In The Thin Red Line, his 1962 novel about WWII, James Jones, himself a wounded veteran of Guadalcanal, has his grizzled protagonist, Sergeant Welsh, mutter: 'What is it all about?... What remains? Property.'... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Our-Western-World-Nothing-New.php While conscription has gone out of fashion in some parts of the world and wars haven’t been waged on quite the same scale, atomic missiles now point in all directions and massive armies continue to drill for the apocalyptic battle that their generals anticipate. This agitation looks as familiar as ever and Remarque has already conveyed to us what will be in store for all who are handed the means of battle and self-destruction. https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Charles-Taylor-The-Language-Anima.php Ein bild hielt uns gefangen. Followers of Charles Taylor will recognise Wittgenstein’s dictum as a leitmotif running through his recent work. ‘A picture holds us captive.’ Analytic philosophy has a blind spot, says Taylor, and, for all its achievements, has restricted our view of who we are, and thus of how we relate to the world, into an overly-narrow perspective. His latest book – drawing on a lifetime’s work – aims at broadening that picture, so as to pave the way to free us from it... https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Pulling-the-plug-on-dream-interpretation.php On a beach on the Adriatic coast of Italy in 1970, I was about to wade into the sea when I stopped to answer a question about the language of my dreams. Two young employees of the hotel where I was staying with my mother and sisters were setting up the striped beach umbrellas and folding chairs, as they did every morning, when one of them asked me if I dreamt in English or Italian... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tolstoy-Caius-Is-Mortal-On-the-Death-of-Ivan-Ilych.php Does Tolstoy, in his late years, load the dice for the sake of teaching a moral lesson? Does he leave room for any ambivalence, for any genuine irony? Edward Wasiolek reported years ago that his students, fed on Henry James’s belief that reality had myriad forms, used to complain that Tolstoy’s famous novella The Death of Ivan Ilych was arbitrary, preachy, painfully lacking in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning.' https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Herman-James-Whitaker-Storyteller-of-North-and-South.php I was led to Whitaker when writing the biography of the artist Clay Spohn, who spoke highly of an artist under whom he had studied—Xavier Martinez. I found an article about Martinez which included a reproduction of a portrait he painted of a beautiful young girl, Elsie, the daughter of the “Canadian novelist” Herman Whitaker, a ”literary giant” of the California golden age of artists. Curious, I read his works. They captured the lives of lumbermen, ranchers, remittance men and Cree Indians of western Canada, workers in northern Quebec, plantation overseers and their Indian slaves, horse thieves and Gringos in Mexico. That he is unknown to Canadians is no surprise. How did he, born in Huddleston, Yorkshire in 1867, reach literary fame in San Francisco in the first quarter of the twentieth century? https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Our-Longstanding-Love-Hate-Relationship-with-Vaccines.php When I sat down in early 2016 to begin writing a book about the history of vaccines, I realized that anti-vaccine movements always seemed to accompany each new scientific breakthrough. Indeed, an infectious disease colleague of mine managed, for a time at least, to convince me to not discuss this link. He argued that anti-vaccine sentiments had long since evaporated with the exposure that charlatans, such as Andrew Wakefield, had falsified data and were motivated solely by greed. Yet, I returned to the project on November 9, 2016, motivated by the fact that the United States had just elected its first anti-vaccine president... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Reinhold-Niebuhr-and-the-Scandal-of-the-Twentieth-Century.php Around the middle of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was the most prominent Protestant theologian in America. He was on the cover of Time magazine (March 8, 1948). More recently, Barack Obama called Niebuhr his favorite philosopher. Niebuhr is author of the well-known serenity prayer... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Primo-Levi-Cosmos.php PRIMO LEVI COULD be deceptively modest. Despite the fact that he published some twenty books, in just about every literary genre, he sometimes cultivated the image of a nonliterary author, a scrittore non scrittore, as he once phrased it: a writer-witness, a writer-scientist, or an accidental writer. He wrote in solitude, unaffiliated with any universities, literary establishments, circles, or movements. He worked for thirty years as a chemist and manager at a paint and varnish factory. His most famous work is nonfiction, and its subject matter—Auschwitz—is so overwhelming that one can miss its literary depth. He wrote in an age that prized the novel, but his two novels, The Monkey’s Wrench and If Not Now, When?, are not among his most important work... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-the-Stomach-of-a-Termite.php Words allow us to navigate our way through life, but map is not territory. The ground we walk on is very different from our verbal accounts of it. It would be foolish to imagine there’s a one-to-one correspondence between language and landscape, word and world. Our diction simplifies, omits, distorts, and highlights. We talk and write in patterns that mirror the isobars dictated by the weather of our needs. Language is obedient to the imperatives of desire and hunger, greed and curiosity, love and hatred, rather than to any objective lexicon that offers a verbatim tracing of what’s there. But for all their limitations and distortions, words extend and enhance our cognitive reach, provide us with enzymes for understanding what, without them, we couldn’t digest. Language is a kind of micro-fauna of the mind, the essential tool in our cognitive toolkit. We farm it in our diction and rely on the harvests that it offers. For all its familiarity, it is as incredible as anything that happens in the stomach of a termite... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Interview-with-Joel-Burcat-Author-Of-Environmental-Thriller-Amid-Rage.php Amid Rage is based on scenarios both real and imagined. There have been incidents where DEP lawyers and their families and inspectors have been terrorized by people associated with the industries that they inspected or were regulating. To my knowledge, thankfully no one has died, but for fictional and dramatic purposes, I took a different tack... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-Style.php Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face. To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be it never so fine, is not long in arousing disgust and abhorrence, because it is lifeless; so that even the ugliest living face is better. Hence those who write in Latin and copy the manner of ancient authors, may be said to speak through a mask; the reader, it is true, hears what they say, but he cannot observe their physiognomy too; he cannot see their style... https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alexander-Schmemann-Between-Utopia-and-Escape.php man became man, not because he invented the wheel, — important as it may have been. Not because he is the Homo Sapiens, or because he discovered the logic of Aristotle. But, he became man when he became Homo Adoratus, the man who gives thanks... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-Style.php Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face. To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be it never so fine, is not long in arousing disgust and abhorrence, because it is lifeless; so that even the ugliest living face is better. Hence those who write in Latin and copy the manner of ancient authors, may be said to speak through a mask; the reader, it is true, hears what they say, but he cannot observe their physiognomy too; he cannot see their style... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Meditations_Divagations_on_Two_Sonnets.php Of the French Symbolist School of poetry, Nicolas Berdyaev writes in his Crisis of Art (1917) that its contributors not only acutely sensed the profound spiritual crisis that had shaken and shattered Western culture since the Eighteenth Century at least, but attempted a new, redemptive synthesis that would function as the equivalent of 'the sacral art of the ancient world and of the Medieval world.' (The translation is that of Father S. Janos.) The Symbolist poets, as Berdyaev plausibly describes their aspiration, 'wanted to lead art out of the crisis through a return to the organic artistic era'; they sensed that the arts 'are a product of differentiation' of an historical type, and that they 'derived from a temple and cultic origin… developed from an organic unity' and 'were subordinated to a religious center.'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-Utopia-Redux.php There are two pathways to utopia, and by extension to eutopia—a better rather than a perfect place. The first one is commonplace, having been pursued in every society since the dawn of society, and its principles are as simple as rain. We try to engineer behaviour by tweaking the rules that govern behaviour in society: constitutions, laws, contracts, regulations, norms of conduct, school curricula, and the like... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Letter-From-Ukraine.php Ukraine is being held hostage by a war that is not really a war—but this depends on one’s point of view. For the separatist forces in the east it is a rebel conflict. Media pundits call it a proxy war between Russia and an amorphous 'West.' Xenophobic elements in Russia refer to it as a struggle for independence. Meanwhile, tanks and troops roll through Lugansk, Donetsk, and Mariupol without identifying insignias, leaving the Ukrainian forces to battle a ghost army—combat without identifiable combatants... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Vietnam-A-Half-Remembered-Tragedy.php By 1995, the liveliest bar in Saigon was 'Apocalypse Now.' With admirable economy, the bar’s owners managed a gentle dig at America’s infamous military defeat by giving a nod to its ongoing cultural dominance, trivializing both by using the iconic movie name to sell alcohol. If anyone could fully appreciate the wicked ironies of war, even those of victory, he or she would be southern Vietnamese... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Chess-vs-Checkers-and-Other-Diplomatic-Dances.php On October 2, 2018, Saudi journalist and government gadfly Jamal Khashoggi entered his country’s consulate in Istanbul to obtain some paperwork to finalize a divorce and never emerged—alive. Now, the world knows, it is there he met his end, at the hand of a gang of 'rogue operators' (in the Saudi view), sent by Riyadh to coax him to return home, and if that failed, expedite his return by force. It is there that things went haywire (in the Saudi view). A fight erupted that resulted in Khashoggi being strangled after a hood was placed over his head. Then there is the Turkish view: the 'rogue operators' were an assassination squad sent to Istanbul, with orders from the very top, to dispatch with Khashoggi, and they brought along a bone saw to reduce his body to smaller bits that could more easily be disposed of. Whichever you believe, it does not change a simple fact—Jamal Khashoggi is no more... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Some-Expertise-Deserves-to-Die-Some-Does-not.php Marx was in some sense right, and Trump is in the same sense right. Why else do we love fantasy movies about 007 and SEALs and people who can change the world through muscle and a bullet, right here right now? But fantasy isn’t reality, and the danger of confusing the two is very great. The issue isn’t expertise alone, and rejecting it won’t help us. Reject certain experts, sure. Or say that others are insufferable even if possibly right. Or that life isn’t long enough for us to understand the arguments. Or that sometimes feeling wins over intellect. But feeling doesn’t always best knowledge, and not all experts are pompous fools, and the world has changed from frontier days. Make specific judgement calls, don’t just reject expertise. Sometimes “show me” is the right answer. But sometimes it isn’t... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tidying-up-with-Socrates.php Let me present to you the ultimate life coaching team: Marie Kondo and Socrates. Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing consultant devoted to uncluttering our households. Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher devoted to uncluttering our minds. If we open ourselves to their methods of tidying up, they promise, we will live a happier life... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Russia-and-the-West-Fyodor-Tyutchev-on-Russian-Exceptionalism.php For Dostoevsky, Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873) was equal to Pushkin as a 'poet-philosopher.' And Tolstoy once said that 'no one should live without Tyutchev.' The Slavophil Alexei Khomiakov argued that Tyutchev was the first Russian author who saw the differences between Russia and the West through the prism of religion. Ivan Aksakov, the 19th century Russian intellectual (and Tyutchev's son-of-law), believed that in Tyutchev's political letters, Europe heard for the first time the 'strong and masculine voice of the Russian public opinion.'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Downfall-Of-The-Sacred-Russian-Realm.php Over the span of several days, with amazing an ease and lack of harm there has occurred greatest an event in Russian history and one of the greatest events in world history. Truly, in how this Russian revolution occurred, is something legendary. It all still seems, that it was from a dream of sleep from which we suddenly awakened. From an outward point of view what happened was a political turnabout, just like many in history. But from deeper a perspective what occurred was an event of exceptional importance and significance: there fell the thousand year sacred Russian tsardom, with which had been bound up great hopes and illusions, the last holy kingdom of the world. And this downfall of the sacred Russian tsardom in its significance can be compared with the downfall of Rome and Byzantium, though it occurred in quite different an historical setting and for different reasons -- the Russian state itself did not fall, it can moreso still flourish. After the downfall of the monarchical principle in Russia it inevitably will have to fall throughout all the world, since Russia was its final bulwark and its most mighty and intense expression... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ruin-Of-Russian-Illusions.php The catastrophe, termed the Russian Revolution, through all the degradations, tribulations and disappointments, has to lead to a new and better awareness. Such an experience in the life of a people cannot but enrich and sharpen our perceptiveness. But a crisis of soul will have to precede this perceptiveness with a readiness for repentance and humility... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Elizabeth-Bishop-Charles-Darwin-And-Building-Watts-Towers.php By the time I launched into psychoanalytic training, with all its reading requirements, control cases, hours of close supervision and my own analysis, I had finally been able to absorb myself not only in the thoughtful and inspired content of psychoanalysis, but also the process of being completely immersed - of falling into and being surrounded by a discipline that satisfied me as no other. I wanted to continue finding that immersive experience after I graduated, but the idea of delving into psychoanalytic theory or history wasn’t the direction that gave me the same, all-enveloping, meaningful pleasure... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Academia-Doesnt-Have-a-Clue-About-Men.php There is no correct academic view of men in the contemporary world, and hence no theoretical vocabulary for considering them that seems anything other than wrong to most men, who deal with this fact by turning away and refusing to engage. This gives the talkers the mistaken impression that they have won the battle. They haven’t. Men have just walked away, usually in disgust, and at best with disinterest... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the_handmaiden_of_leviathan.php The mediocrity of Edward Gibbon’s Oxford professors caused the great historian to call them 'academical bigots,' and to say that the fourteen months he spent at Magdalen College were 'the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.' We should not think too harshly of those long-dead dons, since corporate academics are bigoted by design. University men think as a unit. Confronted with an extraordinary character like Edward Gibbon, they therefor naturally set to work grading this mountain down to the dead level of their uniform mediocrity... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-Ta-Nehisi-Coates-Between-The-World-And-Me.php Do police racially profile working class Asian Americans? Of course they do. Does Jeb Bush feel it’s better to claim that when he said 'anchor babies' he really meant Asian immigrants rather than Latinos? After all, he needs the Latino American vote. Bush doesn’t care how many Asian Americans he pisses off. We’re not a political force to be reckoned with. When the European American Emma Stone plays a quarter Hawaiian, quarter Chinese American in Aloha, do any non-Asian Americans care? Does anyone think of how Stone would never be able to play someone who was half black because the uproar would be too huge? How do I, a third generation Japanese American, center myself in such a world? Is that even possible? As I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, part of me keeps these questions in abeyance. They are not questions Coates invokes in his book. ... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Courtesy-Cathleen-Calbert-Poetry.php Must one be civil to evil? Shake the devil’s old horny hand? Shouldn’t we fight good’s upheaval? Can’t we finally take a stand?... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sally_Ann.php Short Story http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Liberal-Theory-Of-Human-Nature.php Justice is neither fixed nor transcendent, but a source of will emanating from each and every human interchange. Because justice is alive, it continues to evolve in ways that cannot be predicted. Justice demands humility, obedience, listening, and tending to its cultivation for those who next will dwell within its torch. How much more majesty there is in the vision that the unique aspect of our nature is animated not by tooth and claw, but rather by our tribe’s ancient mission to transform the power of aggression into the bounty of communion... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mutual-Aid-A-Factor-of-Evolution.php Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find — although I was eagerly looking for it — that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Spark-Neglected-Burns-The-House.php Short Story: THERE once lived in a village a peasant named Iván Stcherbakóf. He was comfortably off, in the prime of life, the best worker in the village, and had three sons all able to work. The eldest was married, the second about to marry, and the third was a big lad who could mind the horses and was already beginning to plough. Ivan's wife was an able and thrifty woman, and they were fortunate in having a quiet, hard-working daughter-in-law. There was nothing to prevent Iván and his family from living happily... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Malthus-Dismal-Theorem.php The most powerful ideas, those whose influence radiates beyond the covers of books, inspire both fear and hope. Martin Luther’s claim that every man is a priest did so as did Marx’s conception of the revolution of the proletariat. Robert Malthus’ Theory of Population has this same ability to evoke both hope and fear. Since the day he launched it on July 13, 1798, a considerable portion of its influence can be understood by examining the ways it has engaged the hopes or fears of people and eras... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Who-Defines-Social-Justice.php One of the greatest current political flash points globally across different countries, governments, political systems and parties, academics, media, and minority groups is concern and debate about the elusive and complex concept of 'social justice'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Men-Are-not-Women-Waiting-to-Be-Fixed.php We need to say collectively and loudly that masculinity is real, that being a man is something that is achieved, and that expressing masculinity in actions is or should be the primary goal of males... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Rock-Garden-Of-the-Ryoanji-Temple.php A rock garden would appear to present a paradox. How can rocks, however artfully arranged, constitute a garden? Rocks are not living things, but living things make up a garden, do they not? These living things are plants, in a word, and they grow and change with the seasons. In a landscape garden they would likely be trees, shrubs, flowers, and grasses. But rocks are inert things. They cannot grow, nor can they change. At least, not on their own. The rock garden of the Ryoanji temple appears to present this paradox more acutely than do most gardens of this kind... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Jordan-Peterson-Is-So-Necessary-Nowadays.php Jordan Peterson, educated at McGill in Montreal and teaching in Toronto, is the new North American 'it' boy—and maybe beyond. Or rather, the point is precisely that he’s not a boy but a man. He’s the stern uncle who tells boys who want to be men how to do it... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-makes-the-West-unique-Remi-Brague.php When one proposes, as I do here, to speak of Europe and culture, one must first say what one means by Europe... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/European-Culture-Russian-Slavophile-Culture.php At our last meeting, you and I had a long discussion about the nature of European culture and the characteristics that distinguish it from the culture that belonged to Russia in ancient times, traces of which to this day not only can be observed in the customs, manners, and mindset of the common people, but also permeate the soul, the turn of mind, the whole inner content, so to speak, of any Russian who has not yet been transformed by a Western upbringing... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/John-Courtney-Murray-American-Pluralism.php The 'free society' seems to be a phrase of American coinage. At least it has no comparable currency in any other language, ancient or modem. The same is true of the phrase 'free government.' This fact of itself suggests the assumption that American society and its form of government are a unique historical realization. The assumption is generally regarded among us as unquestionable... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Exile-and-Utopia-Nicholas-Roerich-Shortcut-to-Promised-Land.php That Nicholas Roerich, a celebrated Russian artist, was an émigré and that he had lived in New York came to me as a surprise when I discovered a limestone-trimmed row house in a leafy side street of Upper West Side—Nicholas Roerich Museum. The cozy residential street with azalea bushes on the bottom of the stoops struck a dissonance with my memory of a deserted dusty street of my Moscow childhood and The Museum of Oriental Art, equally quiet and deserted, where Roerich’s paintings were exhibited... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Islam-And-Democracy-In-Turkey.php The great expectation about Turkey becoming a model 'Muslim democracy' has entirely failed. All major Turkish groups, the AKP, the Gülen movement, and the Kemalists have shared responsibility in this failure. In the near future, the populist Islamist regime of Erdoğan may create a reaction in the form of a strong secularist backlash. This may remind the rise of Young Turks in reaction to Sultan Abdülhamid II. A more optimistic future scenario is also possible if various groups regard each other as parts of the same nation, rather than enemies to be destroyed. In such a scenario, Turkey may become an electoral democracy again. The recent tragic may turn into a learning opportunity if all groups try to draw lessons... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Cold-War-A-Deconstruction.php The gates at Bornholmer Bridge were opened and crowds poured through, as the overwhelmed East Berlin border guards looked on. Like millions of Americans, I watched the story unfold on NBC Nightly News, Thursday, November 9, 1989. The conflict that had overshadowed everything the postwar generation had known about politics, domestic as well as international, seemed to evaporate before our eyes. One of the East German border guards, overcome with emotion, could not stop asking himself, 'Why have I been standing here for the past twenty years?'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Conservatives-Are-Resurgent-Worldwide.php Liberals, the kind of people who write for many newspapers and who staff most colleges and universities in North America and Western Europe, are still trying to figure out why political candidates antithetical to their views seem to be resurgent... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Many-Faces-Of-President-Donald-Trump.php From Paris to Toronto, Beijing to Washington, people are asking the same question: how does President Trump make decisions? This question is intriguing because Trump often deviates from the norm, opinions about him are so polarized, and the global stakes are so high... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Amputated-Hand.php The Bansurs—parents, older daughter, younger son—were delivered to their new house on a Wednesday. Most of us were at work or in school but a report made the rounds. The family arrived in a U-Haul van driven by a man, presumably provided by The Golden Door. Suzanne pulled up right behind them in her Lexus, bearing flowers and a fruit basket. The refugees had one battered steamer trunk and three pitifully small suitcases... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The_Rotating_Billboard_by_Cristina_Plamadeala.php 'What is life'? Ana kept asking herself this one morning, while sipping her Darjeeling tea. That winter day her thoughts kept bringing her into a world where questions were only asked but not answered... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Postapocalyptic-Dissent.php Cotton Mather began the final book of his Magnalia Christi Americana, published in 1702, by telling the story of a windmill in the Netherlands that turned so wildly during a violent storm its grinding stone became overheated, causing the mill to catch fire and setting the entire town ablaze. Mather went on to claim that the whole country of America was once set on fire by a man with the rapid motion of a windmill in his head... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/God-Being-Nothing-Toward-A-Theogony.php For Ray L. Hart, God is first of all a word, 'a word in the English language'. Because God is a word without an obvious referent, it poses a question to anyone who thinks about the concept that is associated with the word God. And this question “will be a potential goad to think God,” which is the basis for theological reflection... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sunaisthesis.php We are most complete, most alive, when we live for another, and when we tell each other stories about our lives lived together... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Woodrow-Wilson-Religion-And-The-New-World-Order.php Shortly before assuming the presidency in 1913, Woodrow Wilson told a friend that 'it would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.' This now famous exchange notwithstanding, the advent of World War I and the expansive, idealistic vision that Wilson articulated for the postwar order ensured that he and his administration engaged in foreign affairs deeply during his time in office... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/neville-chamberlain.php Eighty years ago, Neville Chamberlain became British prime minister. He is best known for the appeasement policy he pursued towards Nazi Germany. Had he resigned or died before he assumed the post of prime minister, he would have been considerably less known, but significantly better remembered... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sex-and-Gender-Reconsidered.php Gender theory is a hot subject academically these days. In terms of methodology, it is positioned somewhere between humanities and social sciences, because it has found a point of view that makes sexuality subjective rather than objective but still wants to make general observations valid for all. It places the emphasis on the individual and what s/he decides to do rather than on presupposed, unalterable common acts that can only be discussed scientifically and thus independently of the will of the individual, yet wants to say general things about it all the same... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/John-Ashbery-and-Robert-Frank.php Poetry and still photography appear to be incompatible aesthetic media. Both expect the viewer or reader to enact them by participation, but in different ways. Poetry is temporal, with a clearly defined beginning and ending, requiring sequential reading, while a photograph offers a single image that does not oblige the viewer to enact a particular sequence of experiential positions... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Accidental-Gravity.php The Genesee, my first river, was shallow but strong willed at Kishketuck, not many miles above a series of plunges into Letchworth gorge. Once Charlie had to shout awake a placid boatload riding the flow toward the 'Grand Canyon of the East.'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Four-Roads-Hotel.php Remi, my father, would complain about how his children were not servile. Eva, his wife, said he was jealous of each one of them. School promoted good feelings toward parents. We children adopted submissive behaviour. Some of us practised the humility that is fitting for inferiors. We put on acts of gratefulness... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rooms-Second-Antechamber.php it happens she leans into the window as if to feel her own absence. she leans in with obstinate slowness, topples, and behold the pane shatters yes shatters... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Sleeping-Sovereign-the-invention-of-modern-democracy.php Professor Tuck’s book should be of immense interest not only to his fellow political theorists, but also to the rest of us who find ourselves, with whatever degree of formal academic training or practical frustration, wrestling with the continued use of such terms as 'sovereignty' and 'democracy' whether in opinions of the United States or Canadian Supreme Courts or heated debates as part of mass politics across several continents... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Tragedy-Of-U-S-Foreign-Policy.php 'The Tragedy of U.S. Diplomacy' resides in the fact that the concept of the nation state is incompatible with the only pillar of Christianity that the American Civil Religion has retained – its universality. For this reason, the Global Millennial ACR, which remained dormant from Roosevelt’s tenure until the collapse of the Soviet Union –– seeks to devour the United States. This development, along with other problematic trends that McDougall abhors, such as the rise of the surveillance state and the hedonistic “come-and-get-it” culture of Pax Americana, drive him to conclude his opus with dystopian predictions of his own... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Did-Europe-Conquer-the-World.php A hundred years ago, Europeans controlled four-fifths of the world’s land surface outside Antarctica. Philip Hoffman, a prominent economic historian at the California Institute of Technology, asks what had made this possible. His answer is deceptively simple: if you want to conquer most of the globe, you need to be really, really good at waging war. Yet while it won’t come as a surprise that Europe’s endless conflicts had honed the martial skills of its belligerent nations, wouldn’t the same have been true of many other parts of the world? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Great-Place-to-Have-a-War-America-in-Laos-and-the-Birth-of-a-Military-CIA.php Some readers may be unaware that President Dwight Eisenhower told incoming President John F. Kennedy in 1961 that Laos was the most important foreign policy issue facing the United States. This helpful fact sets the stage at the beginning of Joshua Kurlantzick’s new book, 'A Great Place to Have a War.' Starting in the 1960s up until the early 1970s, the CIA waged war in Laos with near total secrecy, and consequently knowledge of the horrific destruction inflicted on Laotian society has been disguised... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Two-State-Impossibility-The-One-State-Opportunity.php It seems an obvious and fair question to ask: Why, after fifty years of occupation and control, hasn’t Israel managed to come up with a solution to the impasse it is in with regard to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? The so-called Two-State Solution has been proposed and is widely accepted as the right way to go—the Jewish state of Israel bordered by a Palestinian state. The US supports it. European governments support it. Even Israel and the Palestinians say they support it. Yet there has been no progress... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Ernst-Kantorowicz.php W. H. Auden once remarked that he sometimes avoided unwanted questions about being a poet by telling people instead that he was a medieval historian. He did so because “it freezes conversation.” Ernst Kantorowicz, however, was a medieval historian who could bring conversations to a boil. Highly cultured and urbane, he began life as a far-right nationalist but had to flee his native land and ended up opposing an anti-Communist witch-hunt in his adopted country. Robert Lerner, himself a leading medieval historian, relates this amazing story with both carefully researched detail and engaging verve... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Fragments-from-the-life%20of-the-spectacular-victim.php I was supposed to be writing about a refugee in Istanbul. Then she disappeared. Most of them do disappear now and then. Shortly thereafter, I had to disappear. Therefore, I am now the subject matter of this text, although I am not a refugee, but rather in self-imposed exile, or a seemingly self-imposed exile. Does the terminology matter if you constantly feel the heartache of that Syrian woman, talking to a journalist on the Turkish coast upon her arrival last summer, saying, ‘I wish I was dead so my pride would not be broken like this’? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/It-Is-Not-Too-Late-to-Learn-from-Hungary-Past.php Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, my friend Renata emailed from Hungary. 'I don't know what to say. We are shocked by the result...What happened to America? Is there any hope to wait for anything good?' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Wo-man-is-Still-the-Measure-of-All-Things.php Protagoras was right. Man is still the measure of all things. Yet nowadays we’ve forgotten this. The happy illusion of our age is that we have transcended the mere human with information, which can be stored in huge quantities (so huge we can’t even imagine) in machines that, unlike old-fashioned storage bins like museums and libraries, don’t take up room and don’t require constant upkeep and maintenance. Information is cumulative: we get more and more of it to the point where humans are dwarfed by its magnitude, and that is good. It never topples over, it never collapses under its own weight, it never gets moth-eaten or decays. And it’s all available to us, recallable to our fingertips by super-fast search engines... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Musings-on-the-feminist-movement-by-a-past-penis-envy-er.php In 1969 I hosted a TV show, THE NEW WOMAN, out of Philadelphia, Pa. WTAF-TV channel 29. I didn’t know then, on the cusp of the feminist movement that I, like goddess Isis, and womankind, would have to pick-up the dismembered pieces of our men, put the pieces back together and, with magic, fashion a new penis for the one that had been swallowed by a crab... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Women-of-Saturn.php 1967 was the most exciting time to be living in Montreal. To mark Canada’s centennial, the city hosted a world fair, Expo 67, and it opened its doors to visitors from all over the world. The Fair provided the illusion of travel, and a vision of the world containing different worlds. Tickets to the fair sites and newly built amusement park, La Ronde, were sold as passports. We could skip and jump from pavilion to pavilion—from Canada, to Russia, to France, to Ethiopia, and back to Canada―as often as we wanted... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Autumn-Irena-Karafilly.php It starts out to be a perfectly ordinary day; a mild, erratically windy morning on which the sky seems undecided between sun and rain and the shrinking hours hint at nothing beyond the usual small blessings and vexations. Dressed in robe and slippers, Kate has stepped out onto the balcony, to pick up a drying bra, but something in the air prompts her to linger under the canvas awning, gazing down at the leaf-strewn lawn, the empty McGill Ghetto street... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ladder-of-Silence.php The ladder of silence consists of seven steps. The first step is habitual prayer. The second step is to speak only when necessary, whatever necessary, to the extent possible... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Barack-Obama-and-the-Pious-Mob.php It is an ancient tale, born thousands of years ago in a remote and shadowy epoch — a story which would be codified many centuries later by the great poets and dramatists who helped compel their culture’s emergence from a frightening and dark age... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Bob-Dylan-and-the-American-Past.php Many years ago, my mother and I were driving down Russell Hill Road in Toronto. I had been living outside of Canada for a while and we were in the long process of catching up. My mother asked me something about my old girlfriend. I thought for a moment and then, instead of answering her question, I sampled Bob Dylan... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-60s-are-Dead.php Back at the end of the 1960s, this movie (M.A.S.H.), at least to me, had seemed like a huge hilarious middle finger to The Man. Watergate hadn’t happened yet (the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. has just re-opened, with a 60s theme and many references to the famous burglary that took down President Nixon: the room cards say 'No Need to Break In'); the US wasn’t yet talking with the North Vietnamese—now we’re buddies with the re-united Vietnam ruled by the north, which probably makes your running shoes. In Nixon’s Vietnam-era America, this movie was the height of good-guy and -gal pacifist chic. The bottom line of the movie was of its time too: sex is good, the military is bad... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Generation-of-Scrappers.php It started with Torrent. In the Internet’s under-toe, a bunch of us were desperate to cobble together a film or video game from the scraps of free-floating bits and bytes... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Greatest-Discovery-of-All.php The greatest discovery of all is the question; the realization that our mind can leap forward from ignorance to curiosity, from appearance to doubt, from assumption to fact – and the consequent realization that in order to do that an intellectual bridge is needed in the form of a question... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Moses.php One might conceive of Moses as a Kafkaesque figure, a person of uncertain speech and identity, a son of two cultures, commanded by Hashem - the Almighty - to talk Pharaoh into freeing the Hebrew slaves, his people, explain the divine mission to the Hebrews and to achieve this with an impaired vocal skill, lips 'uncircumcised'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ideology-of-Vladimir-Putin-Regime.php There is a kind of fusion of religion and politics in contemporary Russia. This does not mean that there is a de-secularization of the Russian state and society; rather we witness a recovery and reinvention of an old form of caesaropapism that is traditional for the Russian political culture and experience. Over the centuries, before the end of monarchy, Russia considered itself as a Christian empire, the Third Rome, a successor of Byzantium, the Euro-Asiatic empire destroyed by the Ottomans. In Byzantium the emperor was the head of state and church. He was God's representative on earth. And now, in the 21st century, we see how these old ideas and mythologies are resurrected and successfully exploited by the power in Kremlin... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-the-Beginning-Was-the-Word-then-Came-the-Film-Version.php Book Review of Nicholas Ruddick's 'Science Fiction Adapted to Film' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Where-literature-meets-science-and-philosophy.php Back in the year two thousand, Peter Swirski took his interdisciplinary approach to Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem. Rather than gushing over their artistic talent, Swirski focused on the extent to which these literary giants stepped into fields usually classified as ‘sciences only’... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Solzhenitsyn-One-Day-in-the-Life-of-Ivan-Denisovich.php As a Slavophile, Solzhenitsyn thoroughly rejected any Western solutions for Russia or for individual Russians living the Soviet nightmare. Instead, he believed that to survive, whether as individuals, as a people or as a nation, the Russian people had to return to first principles, ancient Russian folkways and, particularly, faith in G-d. Indeed, he once summed up his understanding of the root cause of the “ruinous revolution” that, to him, had destroyed Russia: 'Men have forgotten G-d. That is why all this happened.' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Linguistic-Realism.php Historians tell us that the University of Paris in the early 13th century was defined by its universal acceptance of a philosophical dogma derived from Plato and mandated by the Church, namely a belief in the realism of universals: what (say) makes all red things red is Redness, and has independent existence, ultimately in the mind of God. By the 15th century, however, the works of Aristotle with his rejection of Plato had gained the upper hand, and nominalism, the dogma that universals had no independent existence, gradually became the norm. One dogma displaced another. But of course both dogmas were only ever accepted by intellectuals: those outside were merely going about living their lives... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Interview-with-Roy-Scranton.php Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a philosophical meditation, in the tradition of Susan Sontag or Camus, on climate change and how to approach and think about climate change from a humanistic perspective... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Europe-Brexit-and-the-Kantian-garden.php At the end of the day, we have to establish a new narrative, a new formula for Europe. It has to be one that citizens can identify with and, ideally, is acceptable to those who are suspicious of Europe. If this formula does not emerge from the debate that is starting, Europe itself will be the loser... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Christian-Democratic-origins-of-the-European-Project.php As Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI continually reiterated, Europe should not turn its back on its Christian roots which have shaped its values and institutions. This does not mean a return to Christendom but a return to a deeper and wider understanding of what it means to be a European... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Shifting-Europe-a-historical-view.php I recently came across a 1994 volume of the cultural journal Dædalus, still published today by MIT. What initially attracted me was the cover, a colourful oil sketch of Muscovite cupolas, and the catchy title of the special issue: ‘After Communism: What?’ However, the contents were even more worthwhile as a historical time capsule. Academics and politicians of the time try to make sense of post-Communist Europe in a collection of essays analyzing the particular historic moment of the early 1990s: the last time the continent underwent such a sudden, wide-ranging shift before now... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Fein-on-Idol-Worship-Robert-Wexelblatt.php 'Virtue often consists only in a willingness to give in to the smaller vice...' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Do-Not-Turn-The-University-Into-A-Clinic.php There was a time when universities provided a hospitable environment for intellectual experimentation, the questioning of prevailing conventions and the pursuit of robust debate. Even at times when society was dominated by a climate of conformism, the university offered academics and their students opportunities to question prevailing conventions... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-is-Judgment.php We are permitted to judge merely the act of man, his momentous will as expressed in the case. We pronounce a verdict over the casus, and over the particular action, a verdict according to the truth. But the neighbor, not his act, but the neighbor, is the one that we are called not to judge, but to love... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Crisis-of-Liberal-Secularism.php Secularism is not as 'secular' as we are used to hear. In fact, secularism is the unexpected 'child' of Christianity; a child that many non-Christian societies have tried to adopt. This child, metaphorically speaking, has become an adult, and today, it seems to experience a 'middle-age' crisis. These are some of the main arguments of Jacob De Roover's new book 'Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism.'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Hartwig-Ebersbach-Abstract-Avant-garde-Painting-in-GDR.php Although German Reunification commemorated its 25th anniversary last year, the German art scene continues to be weirdly bipolar. By zooming in on individual careers of artists, however, one may come to appreciate the web of complicated relations that shaped East and West German painting during the Cold War and afterwards. Hartwig Ebersbach is a painter of the former GDR, though his success was reared in the West... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Art%20of-Artertainment.php In the second decade of the third millennium fast divisions between high art and popular entertainment are dissolving. On the one hand, popular fiction is increasingly recognized not only as a crucial component of democratizing populism but, on occasion at least, also as art... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Pope-Francis-and-the-Joy-of-Love.php On April 8, 2016 the Vatican issued the English translation of Amoris Laetitia, the Joy of Love, written by Pope Francis. The document consists of 325 paragraphs arranged in eight chapters and takes the form of an apostolic exhortation. An apostolic exhortation is different from an encyclical in that it does not define doctrine. Amoris Laetitia conveys Pope Francis' conclusions about how the family should be understood and how everyone in the Catholic Church should exercise their roles in regard to the family. The exhortation is... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-Montreal-to-Beijing-Daniel-A-Bell.php For a young Montrealer growing up in the 1960s and 70s, China seemed like a far away, almost imaginary place, with utopian communities like Shangri-La and Xanadu (I’ve since visited both places – Xanadu is a patch of grassland in Inner Mongolia and “Shangri-La” is a small town in Yunnan province that has been renamed to attract foreign tourists). My only experience with the country consisted of... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Cracks-Global-Powers.php It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon in the nation’s capital, September 27th, 2015; the day after Chinese President Xi Xinping departed for New York City. Chinese flags placed on the light posts along Constitution Avenue still wave. They flow with the cadence of a cool fall breeze, flanked on either side by the flags of the United States of America and District of Columbia... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Cracks-Global-Powers.php Neuroscience has had limited disciplinary connectivity to the field of International Relations (IR) and Politics. The field of IR is traditionally understood to be about the relations between states, competition, power and resources. As a result, the findings of neuroscience appear to hold little relevance for IR scholars... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Comic-Morality-of-Mikhail-Bulgakov.php I first discovered Mikhail Bulgakov in an anthology of Soviet science fiction. I was a 9th grade nebbish and budding Slavophile haunting the shelves of the Forest Hill Public Library. I wasn’t an SF fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I recognized a couple of the names in the table of contents and the title of the Bulgakov story – novella, as it turned out – caught my eye: The Fatal Eggs. It tells the story of a brilliant scientist who has devoted his life to a masterpiece of pure research: a ray that can speed up and enhance biological processes... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-defence-of-the-soul.php The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, rejected the view that we are immaterial souls temporarily resident in our physical bodies. We are just complicated flesh machines - “What is a Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body?” – and our minds, the ultimate bearers of our conscious experiences (our thoughts, desires, sensations) are just the electrified lumps of meat we call our brains... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/There-is-No-Future-Tree.php My aim is to convince you of a few things, mostly about time. But, more than that, I want to ease your suffering... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Zettabyte-Problem.php The problem with the zettabyte problem is that, even though the proportion of what is culturally valuable to the totality of the cultural information may not have changed (and how would you know?), multiplying both a millionfold has the effect of obscuring the former as effectively as if it was not there at all. It may take a long time, but you can be sure to find a proverbial good book in a thousand. But you will never find a million good books in a billion... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Girl-with-a-Pearl-Earring.php Not long ago I had the good fortune to see the Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer at The Frick Collection in New York City. The painting was part of a visiting exhibit of fifteen paintings from the Dutch Golden Age on loan from the Mauritshuis in Amsterdam. The Mauritshuis was then undergoing a renovation. The renovation is now complete and by all accounts a great success... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the-myth-of-religious-violence.php The historical record suggests that the religious/secular divide is not easily separated into distinct component parts. This is certainly true with respect to overlapping motivations within individuals... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Foundations-of-Natural-Morality.php It is difficult to view the intellectual trends of the past 50 years—or even the past 200 years, for that matter—alongside the argument of this book without thinking that this argument is either hopelessly anachronistic or especially timely. As the author, I hope it is the latter.... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Secular-Powers.php What does it mean to be secular? At one time, secularization was thought to be an inevitable consequence of modernization. With the shift from traditional communities to complex, differentiated societies, scholars predicted, religion would wither away... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Politicized-Islam-and-an-ideological-war-of-attrition.php The declared objective of Islamists has been to bring unity and power to Muslims and elevate their religion to a model for the world to follow. Ironically, they have only succeeded in creating political strife and sectarian division in the Islamic world, tarnishing the image of Islam and making Muslims the object of suspicion and misgiving. Of course, it is easy to identify Islam with Islamists and associate it with violence and reaction, but that would be blaming Christianity, the religion of love and tolerance, for the cruelty of the princes of the medieval Church and Buddhism, with its message of peace, for instances of ethnic violence... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Hijra-before-ISIS.php Along with jihad, hijra is one of the most powerful buzzwords in the vocabulary of the Islamic State. Signifying the obligation to migrate lands under Muslim rule, hijra has become a recruiting tool par excellence and accompanied the Islamic State’s rapid expansion across Syria and Iraq. The lure of migration accounts for the yearly exodus of thousands of young European and American men and women away from their homes to this new state. As the Islamic State expands, hijra is increasingly militarized... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the-emotional-amoral-egoism-of-states.php In 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte, at the heights of his power, set out for the most adventurous, and ultimately fatal, military campaign. Napoleon’s Grand Army of over 500,000 men, the largest force ever mobilized to that date, was led to the lands of Russia. Historians have long investigated the misjudgements of this campaign and the question of hubris emerges as an underlying factor for Napoleon’s vehemence to pursue a disastrous campaign. Hubris is exaggerated pride, often combined with arrogance... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Myths-of-the-Oil-Boom.php Mark Twain once quipped that the 'trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so.' Twain wasn’t talking about energy, which was hardly controversial in his era, but his timeless quote certainly resonates today... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-Political-Fictions.php Politics may be boring like hell to the outsiders, but not to those at the trough. Look again at the legislative floor, prompts Peter Swirski in American Utopia and Social Engineering, his recent book on American culture and American politics... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Springtime-in-the-land-of-mothballs.php On a week-day morning last fall I welcomed a group of well-dressed adults into my ninth grade classroom. It was Grandparents Day at the school where I teach English, and the development office had asked me to offer a mini-course on a topic of my choosing... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/happy-in-10-days.php The man at the registration desk takes possession of my phone and valuables. 'Do you have any questions?' he asks. I hesitate. I have too many to think of the right one. I have just voluntarily handed over my phone—that should occasion a question or two. But I’ve missed my chance... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Post-Rational-Management.php Ever since the European Enlightenments, the English and Scottish 'sociology of virtue' has been in conflict with the French 'ideology of reason'. For the British philosophers the essence of human nature was a moral sense of right and wrong and a natural empathy for others. For the French philosophes, however, reason was paramount, the equivalent of 'what Grace is to the Christian'. Of course this strife didn’t begin in the 18th Century – it dates back through Aristotle and Plato, to much earlier times. Since then, however, the battle between what Adam Smith called 'moral sentiment' and pure reason has taken many forms and has been fought by proxies in many different places... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Nietzsche-and-Tocqueville-on-Our-Democratic-Future.php Democracies are not inherently utopian, but the aim of the modern democratic longing – an age of equality, free from privation and strife – unmistakably is. That those who harbor this longing tend not to consider themselves utopians does little to confute the character of their aims. Many of the greatest utopians of the nineteenth century disdained the title, but their reflections failed to repel the characterization... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Who-are-we-Neurochemical-man-and-emotional-amoral-egoism.php The levels of sophistication of science to date might not have managed to fully grasp ‘what man is like’ in neurobiological terms, yet Chekov’s instinct was sound: acquiring an accurate portrayal of human nature is a prerequisite for creating conditions that respect human dignity and morality. Attempts at moral education which fail to take into account fundamental neurochemical elements of human nature, are bound to prove unsuccessful. In some cases, these may even have undesired effects as they can lead to unreasonable expectations... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Ethics-After-Aristotle.php The really great philosophers have enormous influence over the centuries. To take the measure of their impact is to understand European intellectual history in its broad outlines. Kant, Descartes, Plato and Aristotle himself – who was once known simply as ‘the philosopher’ – have all left indelible marks on western culture. Aristotelian physics and cosmology ran out of steam in the early modern era; physics, chemistry and astronomy snuffed out the explanatory charm of geocentrism, the theory of four elements, and celestial spheres. In the twentieth century aspects of Aristotelian metaphysics have made something of a comeback, but it’s feeble stuff compared to the enduring importance of his theory of the good life... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Evil-Men.php Several years ago, my colleague Adam Nadel and I took confessions from a group of convicted war criminals. They were veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army who, during the Second Sino-Japanese war, committed the worst crimes imaginable: torture, rape, murder of children, and diabolical medical experiments upon kidnapped, unsedated civilians. They did not commit their crimes in moments of berserk breakdown or temporary insanity. They committed them over and over again, for years—cunningly, creatively, and with a joyful sense of competition over who could do the most... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Revelation.php Revelation or the Apocalypse of John is one of the most provocative texts in the Bible. It has inspired great art and music, even as it has fueled speculation about the imminent end of the world. My study of Revelation asks how people have construed its meaning in such different ways, and it offers a way of reading it that is socially engaged and profoundly hopeful... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/To-Engeneer-is-Human-To-Forgive-Design.php The working title of my first book was 'What is Engineering?' I had begun asking that question of myself in earnest the late 1970s. At the time, I had earned three degrees in engineering; I had worked as an engineer; I was registered as a professional engineer; and I had taught engineering. Yet when a layperson neighbor or colleague in the humanities or social sciences asked me what engineers do, I could not complete an explanation before his or her eyes began to glaze over... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The_Lottery.php I rounded the busy corner at the traffic circle, dodging the mass of humanity that slides through Delhi on any given morning. Between all the movement I caught a glimpse of him, and as I slipped forward through the crowds he came into full view. He sat propped up against the stone wall on one edge of the road, his body shrouded in a tattered saffron blanket and his head wrapped in a scarf, the same place and position and outfit as always. As I approached him, my eyes were involuntarily drawn to his decaying feet that habitually protruded from underneath the blanket. I often wondered if he did this deliberately, an extra sales pitch for the alms collection that was his pursuit and livelihood.... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Coffee-from-the-Kitchen-Table-to-the-Global-Stage.php I had my first taste of coffee from a glass mug featuring a Mercator projection map of the world. I was ten years old, seated at my grandparents' kitchen table. Grandma had ordered the mugs sometime in the early 1970s from Life magazine, which advertised them as a promotional offering from the Nestle corporation. Through the obloid glass, the scalding hot coffee looked like weak tea, and it offered only the barest hint of flavor. Quality was beside the point. It was all about getting grandpa ready for his long shift hauling freight in semi-truck and trailer... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Loudest-Noise.php Many who have spent some length of time in Rwanda will know that the place has a certain feel to it. Perhaps they can’t quite put their finger on it, and some might even ignore it – but one common observation persists: there is something sinister in the air. It might come from knowing that the genocide of 800,000 people took place in 1994, which is not so long ago. The killing was ferocious, and when it was over, the killers and victims went back to living side by side. 'Hi Neighbor'. Inevitably, they suffered from the memories of the genocide – either because of who they lost, what they did, or in many cases, both – and on top of that, they suffered from fear of revenge and repressed emotions. This repression was an executive order: the government insists that notions of ethnic identity and the competition for power between them gave rise to the genocide, and all discussion of ethnic differences was consequently banned. Identification cards detailing ethnic affiliation were taken out of use, and the few who publicly speak of separate ethnic groups – particularly when pointing out that moderate Hutus were killed alongside Tutsis during the genocide – are accused of supporting terrorism or espousing genocide ideology, both crimes that come with lengthy prison sentences yet hopelessly vague definitions. Still, everybody knows who is Hutu and who is Tutsi... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Truth-about-Gaza.php I grew up and spent 22 years of my life in Ashdod, an Israeli city located 25 kilometers north of the place we call Gaza. I’ve lived for thirty years in total — and not a single time have I ever been to Gaza. No one in my family has ever been to Gaza. It has taken me some time—I admit, I can be slow—but I have finally figured out why: The Gaza Strip is not a real place. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-indefatigable-agenda.php A bitter gale sliced its way through the heart of Amsterdam the night of February 22nd, 1672, causing "severe cold and dryness," the Hollandse Mercurius later recorded. Dryness is not what one desires when attempting to heat a large, open building filled with wood presses and paper. Dutch buildings in the 17th Century often were little warmer than the air outside. Fireplaces were essential on cold winter nights, even while the growing port city's residents knew flames were always capable of spreading beyond their brick-encased enclosures. But why would anyone be heating, at 3:30 a.m., not a private home, but the largest printing house in Europe?... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Letters-Stuart-A-Kurtz-Marianne-Moore.php Stuart A. Kurtz on Kirby Olson's article 'Marianne Moore and the Just War Tradition' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Existential-Encounter.php The encounter with death has been a central theme in Western philosophy in general and in Existential philosophy in particular. The other boundary of human existence, birth, has been treated at best as a marginal phenomenon; at worst, completely ignored... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-I-Became-An-Existentialist.php Before there was post-modernism, there was modernism. Before there was deconstructionism, there was existentialism. I belong to that earlier time... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Marianne-Moore-and-the-Just-War-Tradition.php The Presbyterian poet Marianne Moore comes out of a religious tradition that has been largely severed from the literary and artistic world... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Public-figures.php Before Amanda Bynes went loopy, we had never heard of her. Maybe we missed her on Oprah. Now that we think of it, she probably never went on Oprah... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Human-Desperation-and-the-Limits-of-Modern-Medicine.php The air was the hot and heavy sort common just before the monsoon. It had a peculiar mixture of industrial strength antiseptic combined with the usual village smells of blossoming flowers and rotting waste... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Catholic-Worker-Movement.php There’s an old prayer, attributed to St. Catherine of Siena: 'Thank you, God, for giving me what I didn’t know I needed.' The 'what' for me is the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1932 and still on the planet, sturdy and strong in 2014... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rumpus-in-The-Middle-East.php Einat Wilf was a member of the Knesset between 2010-2013, representing a break-away Labour party faction under Ehud Barak. A graduate of Harvard University, she holds a Ph.D. in political science from Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. Born and raised in Israel, she grew up in Jerusalem... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-Literature-to-Biterature.php Computers and literature, computers and art, computers and creative imagination—among hundreds of questions related to the relationship between human mind and machines, Peter Swirski also asks the most important one: under which conditions an intelligent computer would be capable of creative writing... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-big-city-as-Garden-of-Eden.php Centuries of human endeavor including animal domestication, agriculture, market economy, industrialization, science, have come between the Garden of Eden and us. This regrettable separation has incited archeology to dig into a very distant past in search of this garden of our lost innocence, alleged... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/State-and-Ideology-Notes-on-Niebuhr-and-Voegelin.php "Undisciplined" notes on Reinhold Niebuhr and Eric Voegelin... http://www.themontrealreview.com/submissions.php THE MONTREAL REVIEW IS NOW ACCEPTING BOOK REVIEWS AND LONG-FORM CRITICAL ESSAYS ON SUBJECTS RELATED TO THE FIELDS OF THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THEORY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, HISTORY, ART AND LITERATURE. THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR THE NEXT ISSUE IS DECEMBER 20th, 2014. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Toqueville-America.php In May 1831, at the age of 25, Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States as part of a commission of two to study the American prison system, returning to France nine months later to write up his report and start work on his famous Democracy in America... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Desire-Passion-and-the-Politics-of-Culture.php Thoughtful discourse about cultural politics is jeopardized by the intrusion of ideological abstractions. In an attempt to avoid them, I’ll begin with two personal anecdotes... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Reflections-on-Literary-Craft.php I have an idea for a short story, but doubt my ability to pull it off. I haven’t written any stories since high school, where I received enough encouragement to convince me to apply to a fiction workshop in college and to a poetry workshop as a back-up... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-to-Speak-Weimar.php In recent years 'Weimar-talk' has been an important part of American political pundits’ toolkit. Soon after September 11 it was common to regard George W. Bush’s 'War on Terror' as a modern version of Article 48, the constitutional provision authorizing temporary suspension of democratic liberties... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Following-the-Saints-Footfall-by-Footfall.php Several hills and valleys into my first day of walking the 100 km St. Cuthbert Way from Melrose Scotland to Holy Island, England, I stopped to check my bearings and time. I'd arrived at a point of decision. On a pilgrimage trail you might argue that every step is a point of decision, but on a map... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Silence-of-the-Acropolis.php In the spring of 1972, I headed from the States to Europe with that wave of young North Americans for whom an international adventure was an essential experience in the new era of personal growth... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/To-Find-The-Catholic-Movement.php My copy of 'Loaves and Fishes: The Story of the Catholic Worker Movement' is falling apart. There is almost nothing holding it together... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/on-referendums.php The Québec referendums of 1980 and 1995, conducted by René Lévesque and Jacques Parizeau, were essentially a response to pressures from within the Parti Québécois, from party stalwarts not the electorate, which by tradition is the general motivation for conducting a referendum. Lévesque and Parizeau never thought they could win. The referendums were conceived as a lynchpin for holding the party together in its quest for political power...If a nationalist party wins a majority they have no choice but to call a referendum, even if they know they are going to lose. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Syria-and-The-Power-of-Wrongdoing-War-and-War-Crimes-in-the-21st-Century.php Syria is awash with war crimes. The people suffer deliberatively inflicted hardship and harm. This is war marked by war crimess--the hallmark of the last three decades, where almost every armed conflict has been marked by strategies of war crimes. Syria is among the worst cases. Yet, those... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Advent-of-Virtual-Realism.php David Shields’ 2010 anti-novel Reality Hunger is a kind of 205-page manifesto composed of 618 brief numbered sections, the longest no more than a few pages, though most are limited to a few sentences. These passages are, by and large, uncited quotations from other authors. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-is-Political-Theology-and-Why-Does-it-Matter.php In 2003, Mark Lilla published his book The Stillborn God, that examines the tension between modern political philosophy and a more messianic political theology. Lilla claims that modern European thought has struggled with this tension between political theology and political philosophy over the last… http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Plebean-Experience.php 'The plebs' is the name of an experience, that of achieving human dignity through political agency. The plebs designates neither a social category nor an identity but rather a fundamental political event: the passage from a subpolitical status to one of a full-fledged political subject... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Giving-Barbarism-its-Due.php Since my first trip to Europe in the early 1970s I’ve seen Germany become not only the dominant financial power of the Continent but also a model for how to memorialize a violent past... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Fateful-Decisions-and-Foreign-Policy.php Many political scientists, economists and other social scientists, as well as your average layperson, have tended to assume that human beings are rational. Yet, scholars of cognitive psychology have demonstrated in experiments that rationality is sometimes elusive; that our decisions are impacted by many mental shortcuts that contribute to bad decisions; and that decisionmaking, while often reasonably accurate, is also frequently clouded by biases... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Camps.php They traveled north through the city of Weimar and approached the compound at daybreak. It was overcast, and ash sat atop the lofty barbed wire barrier... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Karl-Barth-Romans-Hannah-Arendt-The-Human-Condition.php Love is a strong, problematic word, especially put against another word, action. Love and action are like two worlds, separated by abyss. We speak about them with passion and conviction, but do we practice them together? This was the question that Hannah Arendt and Karl Barth were concerned most writing their books on God and human condition. This is the question that the good man asks himself after witnessing his failure to either love but not act or act but not love http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Marianne-Moore-and-the-Poetics-of-the-Protestant-Work-Ethic.php In Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson, scholar Alec Marsh traces the economic theories that ran through the work of modernist poets... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conscious-Evolution.php We are always cloaked in what has come before. But for decades I have held close to my heart a belief I discovered in Helene Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-New-Cold-War.php Peace, jobs, and prosperity in the 21st century may hinge partly on positive relations between the United States and China. And that raises a critical question: Will these countries get into a new cold war of dangerous tensions, harking back to U.S.-Soviet relations in the 20th century? And how can... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Egypt-The-Fall-of-Mohammad-Morsi.php In February 2011, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned after the armed forces sided with several thousand protesters who had gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to demand his removal. With the probable exception of those who still supported Mubarak, replacing him with a military government was... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Power-Without-Violence-A-Lesson-from-Tribal-Communism.php As dawn arises in the Mbya tribe, one of the last remnants of the once large group of the Tupi- Guarani Amerindians, in the jungle of large trees inside what is now Paraguay, very often a pa’i, a prophet-singer, rises... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conspiracy-and-the-Death-of-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy.php An American president, feted as the inviolable creature of Camelot, accompanied by a pristine, porcelain wife and a sense of opportunity, is felled by an assassin while touring Dallas on November 22, 1963... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Woody-Allen-and-Wealth.php Jokes, jazz, psychoanalysis, sex, magic, Manhattan: scholars, critics, and commentators have scrutinized the obsessions and influences of Woody Allen's films, but his relationship to wealth remains largely unplumbed... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mind-Brain-and-Free-Will.php Many thinkers of recent decades have told us that science shows that humans are merely complicated machines, and that our actions are almost totally predetermined by our brain states, themselves predetermined by our genes and environment... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rabelais-Brother-John-Humor-and-Humanism.php François Rabelais was born towards the end of the 15 th century near Chinon, France. After receiving an education in French Catholic schools, he became a monk in the Order of St. Benedict, later going on to study medicine. In 1532, he published Pantagruel, followed in 1534 by Gargantua... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Frere-Jean-portrait-de-la-personne-ideale-selon-Rabelais.php Rabelais est né vers la fin du XV siècle près de Chinon. Après avoir reçu une formation dans les couvents catholiques français, il est devenu moine dans l'Ordre de Saint-Benoît, autrement dit l'Ordre des Bénédictins... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Tokyo-Contemplating-Tea-Bowls.php Tea bowls are alive! Were I to assert this proposition in causal conversation with you, you might well think that I had been imbibing something a wee bit stronger than tea... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Are-You-Thinking-about-Taking-a-Cruise.php Is it reasonable to defend a corporate policy which shouts 'Gotcha!' to the vacationer who balks at boarding a cruise ship due to hurricane conditions and requests a refund? Many instances of corporate wrongdoing have been uncovered due to whistleblowers. When the whistleblower is a customer, not a company insider, how likely is it that he or she will be able to be a change agent? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Interview-with-Etgar-Keret.php The first time I read a short story by Etgar Keret, I was working at Symphony Space, a performing arts center in New York.... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Baby-Shower.php The Giants had just won the Super Bowl and the spring semester was underway. The forecast had called for snow... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Legacy-of-Tiananmen-Square.php More than twenty years later, the legacy of Tiananmen Square remains, an unsolved problem. The prominent names in the struggle, such as Wang Juntao, the mentor of the student leaders, or Wang Dan, leader of the Tiananmen student movement, live for the most part in exile in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, or Taiwan... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/China-Facelift-Economic-Development-and-Political-Transition.php In March this year, the moulting of the political structure of the People's Republic of China was completed at the annual plenary session of the National People's Congress and the old faces at the top politely offered their seats to their younger colleagues... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Darwin-and-Dogma.php In September of 2012, the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel published a calm and dispassionate book challenging the reigning scientific orthodoxy of the day. In his book Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that the current materialist, neo-Darwinian explanatory model cannot account for the existence of consciousness, reason and value... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Leviathan-Belly.php In 1956, in the dead-end of the Cold War, Horkheimer and Adorno embarked on recorded discussions in view of a new version of the Communist Manifesto for the new times (just as Brecht had in 1944 felt the need to renew it for the age of world wars and in hexameter form)... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Wright-Brothers-Right-or-Wrong.php The controversy over whether the Wright Brothers were, in fact, the first humans to take to flight on December 17, 1903 in the famed Kitty Hawk in North Carolina has been an enduring one... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Likeness-autobiographical-essays-by-Michael-Milburn.php In our house a hallway ran the length of the second floor, ending at my mother's bedroom. Standing outside my room, I could look down the hall and see whether her door was open, meaning that she was awake and receiving visitors, and whether one of my five siblings was sitting in the chair facing her bed... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tea-with-the-Vicar-or-the-Pleasures-of-Light-English-Fiction.php Some things never go out of style. This means, of course, comic novels published in England in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, they do go out of print... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Emile-Nelligan-un-Dante-d-une-epoque-dechue.php A l'époque de son apogée, Emile Nellighan était un jeune gamin subtil et frileux, intellectuel mais pas livresque, aliénée par sa profonde solitude et angoissé par le manque de discours avec ses ainés... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Green-Economy-A-Load-of-Old-Bull.php Britain, and the EU generally, is in the throes of a crisis of confidence in its food supply. The largely unregulated and highly competitive process of producing what ends up on our plates has been offering evidence of poor quality, dishonest labelling, and probably criminal fraud... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Political-Emotion-From-Pride-to-Envy.php The emotions at the heart of contemporary American political discourse have undergone a dramatic shift. For decades, it was all about pride... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Adam-Smith-and-the-Character-of-Virtue.php Gains and losses; costs and benefits. Thinking in these terms comes naturally to most of us today. And for this we largely have economists to thank... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Democracy-in-Retreat.php After the end of Cold War in the early 1990s, the new millennium sees a return of autocracy and decline of democracy worldwide. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Character-of-U-S-China-Relations.php The 'Chinese dream' (Zhongguo meng), put forth by the new leader Xi Jinping, aspires to match the American dream. Before we dismiss it as just another copycat slogan, let us consider that in history, glorifying labels have often switched owners. At least China does not claim to be God's own country. Just yet. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/National-Identities-and-Bilateral-Relations-East-Asian-and-Chinese-Demonization-of-the-United-States.php Gilbert Rozman on National Identities and Bilateral Relations: Widening Gaps in East Asia and Chinese Demonization of the United States. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Secularism-and-State-Policies-Toward-Religion-The-United-States-France-and-Turkey.php State policies on religion are the result of ideological struggles between the defenders of two types of secularism. In the US, the dominant ideology is 'passive secularism,' which allows public visibility of religion. The dominant ideology in France and Turkey, in contrast, is 'assertive secularism,' which aims to confine religion to the private domain and to exclude it from the public sphere. Other cases where assertive secularism is dominant include Mexico, while passive secularism is dominant in such cases as India and the Netherlands... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/South_Korea_in_the_early_2000s.php SEOUL, Republic of Korea (ROK), June 2001. For reasons of security photography in Kimpo Airport is forbidden. The drive into the city crosses the massive rust-colored Songson Bridge. It was a wet Wednesday evening. Heavy traffic, non-descript post WW2 high rises. Red, green, and blue the preferred colours, a second look revealed some browns and pinks... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Future-of-the-Korean-Peninsula.php The recent visit of Dennis Rodman and members of the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea raises the spectre of Ping-Pong diplomacy in the normalization of relations between China and the U.S. Tragically, this is an unlikely parallel... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Baikonur-Cosmodrome.php Just off the main drag in Karaganda, a coal mining and industrial city in northern Kazakhstan, the EcoMuseum is housed on the first floor of a local government administration building. You have to know where you're going because there's no sign on the street, and only a small one on the door... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Necktie-and-the-Human-Condition.php Class, today's topic is: The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who wear neckties and those who comment on those who wear neckties. Discuss... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Maiden-of-Ludmir.php Traditional Judaism severely curtailed the role women could play in the arena of religious duties. Women were viewed as necessarily limited by biology, as Jewish law considered women unclean during menstruation and for a certain time following childbirth. In fact, anyone even touching such a woman was considered unclean... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/I-Am-Your-Man-The-Life-of-Leonard-Cohen.php Leonard Cohen once remarked: 'the kind of thing I like is that you write a song, and it slips into the world, and they forget who wrote it. And it moves and it changes, and you hear it again 300 years later, some women washing their clothes in a stream, and one of them is humming this tune.' While none of his songs might have achieved quite such broad popularity, his work has indeed proved curiously malleable to varied interpretation... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Zero-Dark-Thirty-Heroism-Torture-Propaganda.php The phrase Zero Dark Thirty is mysterious and ominous, but meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the lingo of the United States Armed Forces. Kathryn Bigelow, director of the film with this title, explained on the CBS This Morning show that Zero Dark Thirty is a military term designating thirty minutes past midnight. Neither she nor screenwriter Mark Boal chose to reveal this meaning in the film, so moviegoers were left in the dark. That apparently was the desired effect... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/America-s-Kingdom.php Neo-mercantilism is alive and well 100 years later, as we see in the press, speeches in Congress, and in the recent US presidential debates, where promises of an elusive 'energy independence' echoed once more... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Masscult-and-Midcult-Essays-Against-the-American-Grain.php In 1960, Dwight Macdonald published 'Masscult and Midcult' in the Partisan Review. Here Macdonald introduced his distinction between what he called masscult—or what is more commonly labeled 'lowbrow'—and midcult, which we generally refer to as 'middlebrow.' He identified the characteristics of both forms of culture in America, contrasting them with what used to be known as culture, full stop, but what is today called high culture... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Phases-of-Marxism.php For the last quarter of a century we have been witnessing an understandable, although unsavoury, spectacle that can be called 'poisoning the wells.' Wells are poisoned in war so that no one should drink from them, and the victorious turbo-capitalism fears that Marxism might nonetheless raise one of its nine hydra heads again and obstruct the profitable democide and ecocide. That is why, to the reasonable contradictions that can (and must) be articulated within Marxism, tons of garbage are added in order to poison it. This article is, therefore, a minor act of hygiene... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Popes-of-Egypt.php On November 18, 2012, history was made when Tawadros II was crowned the 118th Coptic Pope in a lineage that started around the year 49 CE, when Mark the Evangelist arrived in Alexandria... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Liars-and-Outliers-Bruce-Schneier.php Most of us recognize this: that it's not in our long-term best interest to act in our short-term self-interest. But not everyone does. That's why we need mechanisms to induce trust. That's why we need security. And that's what Liars and Outliers is about... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Virginia-Woolf-Buddhism-and-Hermione-Lee-Biography-of-the-Artist.php I've been reading Virginia Woolf since high school, and with more focus and intensity in the past five years. It was when I read The Waves for the first time, while living in Thailand and studying Buddhism, that I had an epiphany: not only was I a Buddhist, but Virginia Woolf was too! http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Analysis-of-John-Donne-A-Poet-of-Death.php John Donne has engaged the minds of poets and literary critics for centuries, but what makes him so engaging? Is it the play and paradox of his verse, the audacity of his meter, the range of complexity with which he grapples the world around him? Whatever the case, Donne has proven to be a complex character... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Edgar-Allen-Poe-The-Narrative-of-Arthur-Gordon-Pym-of-Nantucket.php Let us now exhume the corpse of Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I will bring this work into the light from the dark recessed dungeons of scholarly contention, steal its meaning from under the haughty upturned nose of self-indulgent and absurd origins. Pym is not about a man tapping into his right brain in search of... art (Canada), it's not about King Solomon and Jerusalem (Kopley), it is not about slavery or hell... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Super-Bowl-Sunday-on-the-Seine.php You can swallow the 'gout du bonheur' for only five Euros at L'as du fallafel in the Rue de Rosiers in the Marais in Paris. The taste of happiness... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Re-Reading-of-Edmund-in-Shakespeare-King-Lear.php King Lear's Edmund surely ranks among the most despised figures of Shakespearean drama and is often held up as a villain par excellence. A close reading of I.ii and V.iii, however, reveals Edmund in a very different light... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Neil-LaBute-by-D-J-Lee.php Like his predecessors, LaBute creates characters who are psychologically damaged, but what distinguishes LaBute is his obsessive focus on misogyny. It's hard to find a LaBute play that doesn't feature a man who has cruelly dumped a woman and a woman who has never gotten over it. This is a problem if you accept that playwrights and directors dictate our literary tastes as much as they reflect them... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Justice-James-Clarke-Swervings-of-the-Heart.php When my wife Mary and I got married in 1961, the future looked golden. She gave up a promising career as a fashion illustrator to raise a family. I pursued a law career that culminated in my appointment to the bench in 1983. Our children were happy, healthy and bright... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Listening-to-Neil-Young-in-All-the-Wrong-Places-A-Southern-Rock-Memoir.php 'Stay out the way, it's a Southern Thing,' sings Patterson Hood of The Drive-By Truckers. Of course, Hood's is not the only voice warning that outsiders won't ever 'get' this 'Southern thing.' Plenty of insiders like me don't get it either. I love the Truckers, have all their records... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Montreal-Literary-Art-Events.php Dialogues with Rawi Hage at St. James United Church... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-Exceptionalism-American-Freedom.php Patriotism, to quote George Bernard Shaw, 'is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.' The same may be said of American exceptionalism... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Ethical-Lessons-of-the-Financial-Crisis.php It would be a serious error to think the financial crisis resulted from a glitch in the market for mortgage backed securities, or flaws in computer programs at credit rating agencies, or the failure of government regulators to read between lines of fine print... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-U-S-Saudi-Alliance-and-the-Changing-Dynamics-of-Oil.php The peculiar alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia, forged during World War II and lubricated by oil, is being reshaped by dramatic shifts in global petroleum markets.Saudi Arabia's rulers and strategic planners in Washington still find each other useful, especially in confronting Iran, but they no longer need each other as they did in the past... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Syria-Thirty-Years-War.php Edward Luttwak: I don't know anyone willing to do anything about Syria in the sense of knocking off Assad, which we could do in one day of air strikes... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Dream-House.php In an essay called 'Among the Ruins' about three twentieth-century writers, Bruce Chatwin writes, 'On the island of Capri there lived three narcissists who each built a house on the edge of a cliff. They were Axel Munthe, Baron Jacques Adelsward-Fersen and Curzio Malaparte. All three were writers of the self-dramatizing variety. All had a strong dose of Nordic sensibility. And all sought to expand their personalities in architecture...' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Jarry-Park-Education.php I made my Jarry Park debut at night, on a YMCA day-camp sponsored outing. The stadium felt alive, charged and vivid. The brilliant light towers, whose bulbs I tried to count, brought the grass, the warning track, and the white button-like bases into sharp relief. Night meant sophistication and excitement, an invitation to partake of the grown-up world... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Buckwild-and-Downton-Abbey-TVs-Social-Reality.php It's a long way, in geographical distance and creative quality, from the down and dirty world of MTV's reality show hit Buckwild to the rarefied world of U.S. public television's Downton Abbey, but the two TV series have one thing in common, apart from having their new season premieres within a week in January 2013. Both perpetuate social and class stereotypes... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Hey-Website-Makers-Shape-Up.php The other day, when stuck on a website dealing with my research area, global energy security, a thought hit me: am I website challenged--unable to navigate the increasingly complex internet sites on the Wild Wild Web...? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Metropolis-Two-by-Chris-Burden.php The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently exhibiting Chris Burden's Metropolis II, a 20-by-30 foot, multi-storied installation circulating 1,100 toy cars about 100 times over 18 traffic ways at scale speeds of 230-240 mph each hour... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Invaiatura-Short-story-by-Joel-Burcat.php There's a word that the winemakers here use, it's 'invaiatura'-the moment when the grapes change color, they stop growing and begin ripening... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Heart-Of-Florence.php It was Lee Leffert who convinced my parents that I should be taken seriously as an artist. He was the bachelor brother of the next-door neighbors on Tyne Boulevard in Nashville. Tall, athletic, and erudite, Lee visited his family once a year from the Midwest, where he was the founder and headmaster of an exclusive private school... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Lucky-Lady-Short-story-by-Stefanie-Levine-Cohen.php It's been fifteen years now that I've been changing the dining room chandelier light bulbs. Fifteen years of paying the bills and sitting in the driver's seat of the large blue Buick and cooking for one. Fifteen years since making the bed meant smoothing the covers and plumping the pillow on my side only... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Normal-Accidents-Living-with-High-Risk-Technologies.php The immense complexity of some industrial organizations and their tight internal connections occasionally allowed even some small local failures, inevitable in complex systems, to cascade through the system and bring it down. If the system also had catastrophic potential, perhaps it should not exist... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Global-Corruption-Money-Power-and-Ethics-in-the-Modern-World.php Recent scandals in Canada, laid bare by Quebec's Charbonneau Commission and the press, have shown how a tight network of city bosses, construction kings and political fund raisers can determine the award of major contracts and the financial power of political parties... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Crude-Awakenings-Global-Oil-Security-and-American-Foreign-Policy.php A recent report by the International Energy Agency concluded that the United States will displace Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer by 2020. If that does occur, what would it mean for U.S. foreign policy? In particular, could America withdraw from the oil-rich Persian Gulf? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Capital-Coercion-and-Post-Communist-States.php The post-communist transitions are over. Socialism's command economy was successfully dismantled, but unexpected and distorted forms of capitalism arose in its place, often of a thuggish character, more freebooter than free market. And, finally, the transitions gave rise to very different types of post-communist states, bearing little likeness to the ideal liberal state... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Evolution-of-Great-World-Cities-Urban-Wealth-and-Economic-Growth-by-Christopher-Kennedy.php The historical evidence shows that cities progress through three early phases – as centres of commerce, centres of industry, and then transportation hubs – before becoming financial centres... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Machiavellian-intelligence-in-primates-and-Machiavelli.php Since death Niccolo Machiavelli has had a long career in the popular culture. His name spawned the adjective ‘Machiavellian' and the noun ‘Machiavellianism.' Not a week passes but that some journalist espies a Machiavellian and detects Machiavellianism in others... Machiavelli has also been conscripted into primatology – the study of monkeys and their kind. We argue that this use of Machiavelli's name does him an injustice. What do we want? We want primatologists to stop monkeying around with his name. To make our appeal to common decency we recount how Machiavelli, though no fault of his own, came to the planet of the apes. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Soviet-Union-Federation-or-Empire.php Few people in the West believed during the Cold War that the USSR was what its founders and leaders thought it to be. Lenin and Stalin designed it as a new type of federation – a union of ethnic nations or nation-states. Its Union Republics in their turn were also partitioned into ethnic homelands with varying levels of cultural autonomy... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Islamic-Capitalism-and-Finance-Origins-Evolution-and-the-Future.php For a millennium, from the seventh to the seventeenth century, Muslims controlled the intercontinental and transoceanic trade between Europe and the Indian Ocean. While doing this, they also created one of the greatest civilizations of the world. They owed this success to a unique economic system: Islamic capitalism... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-I-Emigrated-from-America.php Not long after I moved away from the United States, a college student was arrested in Louisiana for burning an American flag. He was protesting the extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden. As one might expect, a patriotic crowd soon gathered to protest the flag burning, and one of them was filmed on YouTube shouting, 'If you’re not proud to be an American, then get out!..' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Eating-Angels.php Poetry in prose by Sarah A. Odishoo http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-is-Poetry.php To consider a question such as what is poetry, is tantamount to asking what art is, or what is music... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/war-photography.php The Museum of Fine Arts Houston's exhibition 'WAR PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath' includes a photo of a dead man's lower limbs, stocking feet in loafers, the shot chopped off just above the ankles... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Best-of-2012-Social-and-Science.php Mark Pagel on the origins of the human social mind, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus on the creation of inequality, Melvyn L. Fein on human hierarchies, Michael Tomasello on cooperation, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis on human reciprocity and its evolution, Marco Iacoboni on the science of how we connect with others, Simon Baron-Cohen on empathy and origins of cruelty, David Livingstone Smith on dehumanization, Alex Mesoudi on cultural evolution, Mel Thompson on how did I become Me http://www.themontrealreview.com/donate.php Dear Reader, Once a year we ask for your support. We need your help to continue publishing and promoting some of the world's best authors and their ideas. Presently, the revenue we receive is insufficient to make the Review a self-sustainable publication, so your help really matters. If you are able and wish to make a donation, please consult our 'Donations' page at: http://www.themontrealreview.com/donate.php We want to thank you for being with us. Your loyalty is what makes us happy, proud, and audacious to continue publishing. In 2013, we will try to keep the magazine interesting, informative, diverse, and useful. If you wish to suggest authors, topics, and ideas that you think deserve attention, please write to us at themontrealreview@gmail.com . Sincerely, The Montreal Review Team http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Capitalism.php The critics of capitalism are wrong. As long as people value freedom and growth, some form of capitalism will remain the principal way to organize economies. Political choice will force deviations from time to time, but a free public will find its way back. Capitalism will remain our future. And because we are not perfect, our system will have flaws. Freedom will permit critics to voice their criticisms, successfully at times. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Contending-Economic-Theories-Neoclassical-Keynesian-and-Marxian-Richard-Wolff-and-Stephen-Resnick.php In most societies, economic literacy encompassing the contending theories was neglected over recent decades in and by the one-sided curricula and particular theories prevalent in schools, media, business, and politics. We must now correct for that neglect... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Never-Forget-National-Humiliation-Historical-Memory-in-Chinese-Politics-and-Foreign-Relations.php For many, China can rise peacefully only after it has changed from a communist dictatorship to a multiparty democracy, where officials are chosen in regular elections. However, without liberation from the powerful complex of historical myth and trauma, I worry that a multiparty democracy could lead China into a dangerous development. This is because history and memory issues can be easily used by nationalist leaders as tools for mobilization or for generation of conflicts between a newly democratic China and its old enemies... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Articulating-the-Sinosphere-Sino-Japanese-Relations-in-Space-and-Time.php Pre-mid-nineteenth-century relations in East Asia were decidedly not based on a system of equal, interacting nation-states who contracted treaties regulating their political and economic intercourse. They were hierarchical with the ruling dynastic house on the mainland ('China') receiving visitors from the archipelago ('Japan') and from the many statelets along the peninsula ('Korea'), as well as elsewhere in the region. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Socrates-and-the-Jews-Hellenism-and-Hebraism-from-Moses-Mendelssohn-to-Sigmund-Freud.php 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' This famous cry of the early Christian Tertullian was answered in the nineteenth century with a resounding response of 'Everything!'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Philosophers-in-the-Republic-Plato-Two-Paradigms-Roslyn-Weiss.php It is reasonably assumed that all philosophers in Plato's 'Republic' are the same, and yet, arguably, they are not... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Official-History-of-Privatisation.php The lessons learned from the British privatization. David Parker on his Official History of Privatization http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Fiduciary-Law.php Some subjects 'grow on you.' They keep recurring in the materials you read, and the stories you hear. Perhaps these subjects crop-up because you think about them. For me, fiduciary law is one of these subjects. In early 1970s I worked on a treatise: The Regulation of Money Managers, focusing on investment advisers and mutual funds... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Americans-Essay.php GLENN Miller is probably the University of Colorado's most famous alumnus. Up on a wall in the Glenn Miller Ballroom, scene of square dances sexier than all the tangos of Argentina, hangs a huge likeness of the man... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Visiting-Uncle-Shirley.php My Uncle Shirley left our home in Alabama as a Jewish salesman, and turned up in rural South Carolina as a Baptist preacher. Of course, we didn't realize that last fact until we heard it at his funeral eulogy. The rest of his life was shrouded in an even deeper mystery... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Pool-Short-Story.php Short Story by Matt Domino http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Jakub-Dolejs.php That a photographer's guile can make for a heady and instructive aesthetic experience is proved by the remarkable work of Jakub Dolejs. His ongoing practice of deception now encompasses some of the formal language of late Modernism, and his palette is almost hallucinatory in its clarity... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Pivotal-Decade-How-the-United-States-Traded-Factories-for-Finance-in-the-Seventies.php People trying to understand the Great Recession often look back to the Great Depression. Nevertheless, because the economy of the 1930s was self-contained, its dynamics are unlike those of the contemporary economy. A better way to understand the Great Recession is to link it with the recession of 1970s. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Founders-and-Finance-by-Thomas-K-McCraw.php The United States government started out on a shoestring and almost immediately went bankrupt. To fight its war of Independence from Britain, it borrowed from banks in Holland and wheedled large sums from France, Britain’s great rival... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Reckoning-With-Markets-The-Role-of-Moral-Reflection-in-Economics.php When Adam Smith promoted a market economy in the mid 18th century it was in the context of a moral theory that depended upon personal interaction. In those days the interests of small business entrepreneurs were best served by quality products and service for their customers who rewarded them with repeat business. In many areas of the market today the same strategy applies, but technology, shipping speed and the globalization of markets are testing the interpersonal foundation of trust upon which markets must depend... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-culture-of-dishonesty-and-the-importance-of-moral-behavior-in-economy.php What is so important about morality, especially in economics? And why is a culture of honesty crucial to the well-being of society? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-God-Problem.php Criticisms arguing that religion is irrational have been voiced in recent years by writers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. How is it possible, they ask, for so many people who otherwise claim to be reasonable to be religious? How indeed? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Dao-of-the-Military-Liu-An-Art-of-War.php During the first century of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), an imperial prince, Liu An (d. 122 B.C.E.), gathered together a group of scholars at his court in Huainan, in modern-day Anhui Province . He oversaw a large literary enterprise that produced numerous writings, one of which survives intact: the Huainanzi or Master of Huainan... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Yellowstone-Red-Summer.php It's been a splendid July day in Yellowstone. Cara and I have hiked through a blaze of wildflowers... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Praise-of-Love.php Badiou's new definition of love, which is at the heart of his new book 'In Praise of Love', sounds like something very old, although stated in a novel way... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Rise-and-Decline-of-a-Ponzi.php David Levy on Jeff Prosserman's film 'Chasing Madoff' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/America-Love-Affair-with-Cars.php One of my most enduring childhood memories is when my father brought home a battery-operated car dashboard panel designed to simulate the experience of driving... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Parable-of-the-Seawall-by-Mathias-B-Freese.php An excerpt from 'This Mobius Strip of Ifs' by Mathias B. Freese http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Is-Russia-So-Different.php Why Is Russia So Different? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Quebec-election-result-analysis.php Marcel Martel: It was not a pro PQ vote. We know that more or less 69 percent of the population voted for a party other than the Liberals. I can't name a single political commentator who was not surprised by the outcome. I did not buy the argument that the Liberals would be destroyed. However, I was quite surprised that they managed to elect fifty members... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Unintended-Reformation-How-a-Religious-Revolution-Secularized-Society.php Brad S. Gregory on his book 'The Unintended Reformation' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Religion-Is-Natural-and-Science-Is-Not.php Suggesting that natural science is unnatural and that religion, which traffics in the supernatural, is natural seems to turn things upside down. Sorting out these paradoxes, though, will offer insight about both enterprises... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Less-Than-Human-Why-We-Demean-Enslave-and-Exterminate-Others.php 'Less Than Human' is a book about dehumanization. It is widely recognized that dehumanization plays an important role facilitating acts of violence in genocide, war, and other forms of atrocity. Given this it is surprising to learn that scant attention has been paid to it in the scholarly literature. Scholarly literature on dehumanization is shockingly thin on the ground... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/US-Mexico-Cross-Border-Murder-and-Salvation.php Many Americans view Mexico as a nation of unrelenting bloodshed, where decapitated heads are rolled into nightclubs and mutilated corpses show up overnight on the roadside. Since 2006, when the government began its war on drug traffickers, more than 60,000 people have been killed. But Mexicans see their northern neighbor as awash in violence, too... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Keynes-vs-Hayek.php Today, the world faces another big economic challenge. The works and legacy of both Keynes and Hayek are explored once again, and once again we are not sure who of them gives us the right answer. Should we spend, as Keynes advised, since spending has brought us to the edge of financial collapse, or should we leave the economy to heal itself naturally, as Hayek believed, since deregulation caused the bankruptcy of the financial system? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-New-Yorker-Short-Story-of-Short-Story.php What does it take to get into the New Yorker and what are the odds? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Proconsuls-Delegated-Political-Military-Leadership-from-Rome-to-America-Today.php In his book 'Proconsuls: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today' Carnes Lord argues that the old Roman imperial institution of proconsulship is still useful for America, but only if it is applied according the realities of the day. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sin-The-Early-History-of-an-Idea.php Malcolm Forbes on A.N.Wilson's book "The Elizabethans" http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Father-John-Misty-Josh-Tillman.php Matt Domino speaks with Josh Tillman (Father John Misty) http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Aleppo.php David Levy speaks with Sakhr Al-Makhadhi http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Walls-by-Marcello-Di-Cintio.php In December 1999, hot with millennial fever and desperate to be somewhere 'important' when the clock turned on 2000, I traveled to Jerusalem. On Christmas Eve during that trip, I walked from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The journey was far less biblically-epic than it sounds... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Losses-by-Robert-Wexelblatt.php An excerpt from Robert Wexelblatt's new book 'Losses' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Faith-of-the-Faithless.php The infinite ethical demand allows us to become the subjects of which we are capable by dividing us from ourselves, by forcing us to live in accordance with an asymmetrical and unfulfillable demand, say the demand to be Christlike, while knowing that we are all too human. Although we can be free of the limiting externalism of conventional morality, established law, and the metaphysics of traditional religion, it seems that we will never be free of that 'sordid necessity of living for others.' The latter requires an experience of faith, a faith of the faithless that is an openness to love, love as giving what one does not have and receiving that over which one has no power. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sin-The-Early-History-of-an-Idea.php The idea of ‘sin’ suits its times, argues Paula Fredriksen in her new book ‘Sin: The Early History of an Idea’. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Reasoning-A-Social-Picture.php Anthony Simon Laden on his book 'Reasoning: A Social Picture' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Animals-and-the-Human-Imagination.php The greatest breach in nature, philosopher William James wrote in 1890, 'is the breach from one mind to another...' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-Utopia-and-Social-Engineering-in-Literature-Social-Thought-and-Political-History.php Review of Peter Swirski's 'American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Human-Hierarchies-A-General-Theory.php If human societies are to be modified in directions more people find fulfilling, this can only occur if the nature of human hierarchies is acknowledged and understood. This search is a worthy endeavor to which the social sciences ought apply themselves without committing to a preferred moral outcome... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Karl-Marx.php It is no doubt easier to imagine a world without Marx than a world without revolution, capitalism, communism and socialism. But in the world we actually inhabit, these still have to be seen through Marx... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Addicted-to-Profit-Reclaiming-Our-Lives-from-the-Free-Market.php It is one thing to strive to make a profit out of your skills and talents, something else entirely to indulge in profiteering or to assume that absolutely every area of your life must yield a financial profit... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Michael-Milburn-Poetry.php Three poems from Michael Milburn's new book 'Carpe Something' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the-Zionist-entity-and-the-Occupation.php In August 1967, soon after the Six Day War, the Arab League met in Khartoum, three nos the response to Israel's offer to trade land for peace: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Novel-of-consciousness.php The contemporary novel has many tools available to it in order to construct its work. Novels are meant to create their own plausible and realistic worlds wherein events take place and characters develop. These stories are told from many perspectives, the third-person narrator perhaps still the most popular. However, the most intimate means of engagement in the novel might be the novel of consciousness, which narrates from within the protagonist's mind. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conquest-in-Space-Dreaming-about-Mars.php With NASA's latest efforts on Mars with the Curiosity rover, humanity is now bracing itself for the hope of finding life past, present or future, on a distant plant. Much of this is drivel, suggesting a continued obsession of humankind's 'inner child' ('We discover ourselves through discovering others') but the prospects are intriguing. Colonising Mars will enable us to export rapacity and problems and possibly unearth a few scientific gems on the way... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Spectres-of-Marx-Derrida.php Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Deconstruction http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rare-Earth-Metals-North-Korea-New-Trump-Card.php Paradoxically, the promise of Kim Jong-Il might soon come true and North Korea may become a 'rich and prosperous state' – rich in natural resources and empowered by nuclear technologies. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Montreal-Church/index.php Photo Essay http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Macy-Gray.php An Interview With Grammy-Award winning singer-songwriter, Macy Gray. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sustaining-China-Economic-Growth-After-the-Global-Financial-Crisis.php There is a growing risk that China's economic growth could slow substantially in the medium term.  This would not be the so-called hard landing, which implies a near term sharp slowdown followed by a v-shaped recovery, but rather a prolonged period of slow growth perhaps something around 4 percent, the onset of which might be within two to three years... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rational-Empires-Institutional-Incentives-and-Imperial-Expansion.php 'Imperialism' is an evocative word. It summons images of grim Roman legions marching through German forests, Maxim machine guns cutting down hordes of Dervishes at Omdurman, or scenes of torture from the classic French film 'Battle of Algiers.' These images share two attributes: they are noxious and they are historical – as Tennyson might describe them, 'portions and parcels of the dreadful past.' But is this, indeed, the case? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Russia-Supports-North-Korea.php This year Russia experienced the return of the Kremlin veteran, Vladimir Putin, to the presidential seat. Although he is associated with political reaction and is concerned by the prospect of 'colour revolutions' at home, Russia is desperately running out of friends on the international stage...Belarus, Iran, the countries of Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and now North Korea, have all received special treatment from the increasingly anti-Western Russia http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Copernican-Question-Prognostication-Skepticism-and-Celestial-Order.php In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) publicly defended the hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Origins-of-Morality.php Many people, laypeople and scholars alike, assume that the kinds of dispositions that inevitably prevail in the process of biological evolution must be selfish and immoral, rendering humans and other animals bad by nature... However, this idea is misguided because there are significant differences between selfish genes and selfish individuals. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Poor-and-the-Perfect-The-Rise-of-Learning-in-the-Franciscan-Order.php In his Discourse on the 'Origins of Social Inequality,' Jean Jacques Rousseau identified private property, money and inheritance laws as the chief factors in the creation and maintenance of social inequality in European civilization. But his wisdom was incomplete. He would have benefited from reading the second 'Life of Francis of Assisi', written by Thomas of Celano in 1246... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Courage-The-Politics-of-Life-and-Limb.php Courage, I suggest, is the willingness to risk life and limb for the sake of something. In other words, courage reveals what we care about... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Murder-of-the-Rosenbergs.php David Levy on the Rosenbergs and Walter Schneir's 'Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Oktoberfest-A-Stammtisch-Of-Thousands.php The German language has a word, 'Stammtisch,' that really has no English equivalent. The closest translation is something like 'a table reserved for regulars' or 'regular get-together.' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Olympics-the-politics-and-Baron-Pierre-de-Courbetin.php It all seemed incurably stained to begin with, though it began as an experiment made for moulding the human character. When looking at the record of the Olympics, a negative image emerges... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Dividing-day-at-the-Grand-Hotel-du-Cap-Ferrat.php Norman, my soon to be ex-husband, and I were sitting at opposite ends of the sofa like two prize fighters before a match... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Starbucks-in-the-University-Library-Short-story.php Short story by Cooper Sy http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Comprehending-Kings-Short-Story-Lee-Matthew-Goldberg.php Short story by Lee Matthew Goldberg http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/how-hsi-wei-became-a-vagabond.php Short story by Robert Wexelblatt http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Privatising-Passports.php A few years ago I flew back to Canada after many years in Europe. At Vancouver customs I noticed that the crowds were almost entirely Asian, and they all held out passports just like mine: dark blue, with elegant gold lettering that spelled out CANADA... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Horror-and-Movies.php When I watch horror today, I come to the films with a new set of experiences and from a different place than I did as a kid. When I watch Pet Sematary for the tenth time, it doesn't bother me that Gage gets put down at the end; that's his sleep, his release. What bothers me now are the adult fears, its representations of solitude, shame, and loss... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Kentucky-Derby.php There is no place in the world like Churchill Downs on Derby Day. Yes, of course, strictly speaking, there is no place in the world just like any other on any given day... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Creation-of-Inequality.php How did our ancestors convert the original level playing field to a stratified society? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Stoic-Pragmatism.php The love affair of Western society with technology has reinforced its tendency to optimism. We believe that unhappiness is a curable condition and the application of intelligence will solve every problem... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Prophetic-Peace-Judaism-Religion-and-Politics.php The inspiration to write 'A Prophetic Peace' came from my experiences as a soldier in the Second Lebanon War fought between Israel and the Hezbollah in the summer of 2006... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Liberal-World-Order-in-Crisis-Choosing-between-Imposition-and-Restraint.php Georg Sorensen on the 'Liberal World Order' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Double-Paradox-of-Rising-Corruption-and-Rapid-Growth-in-China.php The three-decade old Chinese economic 'miracle' apparently has a dark side, one which seems to contradict current economic orthodoxy which posits that rising corruption depresses growth rates and slows development... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-We-Hate-Politics-But-Love-Democracy.php Steven Bilakovics: Democratic politics, the citizen's practice of arguing together, comes in turn to seem oddly out of place in democratic society. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Making-Sense-of-the-Republican-American-Presidential-Primary.php Stanley A. Renshon on the politics and policies of the United States http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Serbia-New-President-A-Nationalist-Yes-but-a-Democrat-Too.php Serbia is headed down the drain-again. Or so the analysts would have you believe. The surprising defeat of Serbia's Western-oriented, pro-reformist President Boris Tadic (47.31%), by the former arch nationalist, Tomislav Nikolic (49.54%) in the presidential elections held on May 20, set forth the predictable tsunami of doom and gloom scenarios... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Power-Rules-How-Common-Sense-Can-Rescue-American-Foreign-Policy-Leslie-Gelb.php Leslie Gelb: Foreign policy is commonsense, not rocket science. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Soul-of-the-Greeks-An-Inquiry.php Excerpted from 'The Souls of the Greeks: An Inquiry' by Michael Davis http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-the-Importance-of-the-Ottoman-Straits.php The Russian Origins of the First World War http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Flags-over-the-Warsaw-Ghetto-The-Untold-Story-of-the-Warsaw-Ghetto-Uprising.php On Moshe Arens's 'Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Morality-and-the-Movies-Reading-Ethics-Through-Film-Daniel-Shaw.php Excerpt from 'Morality and the Movies: Reading Ethics Through Film' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Serpent-and-the-Lamb-Cranach-Luther-Reformation.php Cranach, after God, became Luther's 'senior adviser' in the unfolding of the Protestant Reformation... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Paul-Simon-Graceland.php It was an album that spawned theses in paper churning departments. It infuriated, puzzled and confused... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Wizard-of-Oz-Remains-a-Symbol-Of-Social-Progress.php Today, Oz is known by practically everyone in the world, but only a rare person is familiar with the artists who wrote its great songs... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Pale-Horse-Pale-Rider-The-Selected-Stories-of-Katherine-Anne-Porter.php Malcolm Forbes on Katherine Anne Porter's work http://themontrealreview.com/2009/Starbucks-in-the-University-Library-Short-story.php Short story by Cooper Sy http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Future-of-Power-Joseph-Nye.php Foreign and domestic policy become difficult to disentangle. Contrary to the current conventional wisdom about the advantages of authoritarian states, American soft power and its open society may actually give the country new power advantages in the twenty-first century. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tocqueville-Discovery-of-America.php Alexis de Tocqueville is often quoted as a sort of Olympian oracle, lofty and impersonal... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Leo-Strauss-and-the-Conservative-Movement-in-America.php German Jewish refugee Leo Strauss (1899-1973) exercised as much influence on his discipline and on American society as any other political thinker in the second half of the twentieth century... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Isaiah-Berlin-The-Soviet-Mind-Russian-Culture-under-Communism.php Isaiah Berlin believed that ideas matter, not just as products of the intellect but as producers of systems, guides to overnance, shapers of policy, inspirations of culture and engines of history... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Isaiah-Berlin-Essays-on-Soviet-Russia-culture.php Henry Hardy's introduction to the Isiah Berlins's essays on the culture in Soviet Union http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Troubled-Times-Responses-from-the-Ecological-Left.php A review of 'Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism' and 'Plenitude: The Economics of True Wealth' http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Evolution-and-Belief-Confessions-of-a-Religious-Paleontologist.php Many scientists are religious, and consider their beliefs to be entirely rational... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Praise-of-Reason.php Imagine that a mysteriously powerful scientist offers you choice between two doors... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Katherine-Mansfield-The-Garden-Party.php In a paper I wrote on Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party,' I think in the late-nineties, I started by presenting, in brief, the following facts and numbers... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Female-Empowerment-in-Uganda.php Coaching female empowerment to the field in the aftermath of Joseph Kony http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Walking-and-Bicycling-to-Health.php During a recent trip across western Europe by train, my frequent companions were the many strangers, visible outside my train window, who could be seen traversing a vast network of bike paths and walking trails that crisscross the cities and countryside. Europeans of all ages, including seniors, can be seen pedaling from home to town and back again with their daily bread in their handlebar baskets... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/O-Marieville-on-Montreal-Quebec-culture-and-history-change.php David Levy on Montreal's past and present http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Station-Athos-Treasure-and-Men-Robert-Byron.php Robert Byron’s 'The Road to Oxiana' was a smashing success, but was his other great book on The Great Game, the severely neglected 'lost' classic 'The Station,' in some ways even better? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Miss-America-Winners-List-from-1921-to-2012.php The fates and the fortunes of Miss America winners from 1921 to 2012. Painting: 'Reclamation' by Brat Kunkle http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mad-Men-Dark-Shadows.php Matt Domino's Mad Men Reviews http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Opportunity-Cost-short-story-by-Kelly-Stanton.php Short story by Kelly Fordon. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Organizing-Principles-Behind-Economy-Complex-Systems.php It sounds paradoxical, but today it appears that we understand more about the universe than our society... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-Enemies-Become-Friends-The-Sources-of-Stable-Peace.php The role of diplomacy in international relations http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Political-Religion-and-Totalitarian-Ideology.php In his Essays Moral, Literary, and Political, David Hume argued that it is not possible for a competitive political party to "support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one..." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Barack-Obama-personality-and-the-politics-of-redemption.php Stanley A. Renshon’s psychological portrait of the President Barack Obama and the sources of his policy of redemption. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Arc-of-War-Origins-Escalation-and-Transformation.php On the origins, escalation and future of war. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Jared-Loughner-and-American-Violence.php On the night of January 7th, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, twenty-two, checked into a Motel 6 in Tucson, Arizona. He then dropped off a roll of film containing pictures of himself in a red g-string, a gun to his bare ass. Loughner retrieved these photos that same night... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Until-the-Return-of-Babel.php The End of English as World Language? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Brain-and-the-Meaning-of-Life.php An optimistic theory of natural mind http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-and-French-relationship-history-and-politics.php Are the French really so anti-American? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Cultural-Revolution-the-Legacy-of-the-1960s-and-Intellectuals.php Richard Wolin on his book The Wind from the East http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/EU-European-Identity-and-the-Future-of-Europe.php Neil Fligstein on the future of European political integration. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Puritans-Pilgrims-and-creation-of-American-republicatism.php Michael P. Winship on the sources of American republicanism. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Post-Soviet-Russia.php David Levy's reportages from post-communist Russia http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Relentless-Revolution-A-History-of-Capitalism-Joyce-Appleby.php David Levy's reportages from post-communist Russia http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Lyonel-Feininger-at-Montreal-Museum-of-Fine-Arts.php For an exhibition like Lyonel Feininger: From Manhattan to the Bauhaus, the greatest danger isn't incoherence, or sprawl, or over-ambition. It's that everything might cohere a little too methodically. In this eighty or so years of artistic activity--an eighty years that included forays into painting, cartooning, photography, musical composition, and toy design--Feininger displayed a versatility and adaptability that even the most involved showcase might not effectively capture... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mad-Men-Signal-30.php Matt Domino's Mad Men Reviews - Episode 4 http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Meaning-Of-Children-by-Beverly-Akerman.php I'd always thought I'd be a writer some day... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Believing-Cedric1.php As individuals, we make up our own abridged histories. When at a pub or a dinner party, we have a kind of condensed bio that we like to spout off when meeting new people, a single sentence we utter in order to quickly and efficiently convey our story... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Church-in-Montreal-Today.php 50 years after the Quiet Revolution. Photo Essays by Mark Lavorato http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Economic-Origins-of-Dictatorship-and-Democracy-by-Daron-Acemoglu-and-James-Robinson.php If you start in the city center of Nogales Santa Cruz and walk south for a while, at some point you see houses become much more run down, streets turn decrepit. You have crossed the Mexican border into Nogales, Sonora. Though the two cities are made of the same cloth and were once united, now there are sharp differences between the two... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Clash-of-Ideologies-Middle-Eastern-Politics-and-American-Security-by-Mark-L-Haas.php Ideologies consistently had major effects on leaders' core international perceptions and policies. Most importantly, ideologies went a long way toward determining leaders' understandings of which states were likely to threaten and which states were likely to support their core domestic and international interests. Ideologies, in short, to a great extent determined leaders' perceptions of likely enemies and allies... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-International-Relations-of-the-Persian-Gulf.php The eyes of the world have rightly been focused since the beginning of 2011 on the popular upheavals in the Arab world. Leaders have been deposed in three Arab countries, very possibly in a fourth (Yemen, where President Ali Abdallah Saleh has resigned but remains in the country) and Bashar al-Asad hangs on against the most serious challenge to his family's rule since it began in 1970... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Globalization-Paradox-Democracy-and-the-Future-of-the-World-Economy-by-Dany-Rodrik.php The world has seen globalization collapse once already. The gold standard era–with its free trade and free capital mobility–came to an abrupt end in 1914 and could not be resuscitated after World War I. Could we witness a similar global economic breakdown in the years to come?... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Relentless-Revolution-A-History-of-Capitalism-Joyce-Appleby.php Where the Capitalist Dynamic has Brought Us... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-is-Left-of-the-Left-Democrats-and-Social-Democrats-in-Challenging-Times.php When the “great recession” hit in September, 2008, it seemed that an era had ended. Since the 1980s, if not before, a pro-market consensus had governed economic policy-making and constrained political options in the advanced countries. For three decades serious politics had been about relying upon markets rather than the state to generate growth and, to that end, extending the reach and remit of market forces... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Re-Forming-Capitalism-Institutional-Change-in-the-German-Political-Economy.php My book recounts the transformation of the German political economy after the end of the postwar growth period in the 1970s... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/10-Steps-to-Repair-American-Democracy-A-More-Perfect-Union.php Excerpt from the Introduction to "10 Steps to Repair American Democracy: A More Perfect Union, 2012 Election Edition" by Steven Hill http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Lincoln-and-the-Politics-of-Christian-Love.php Every Lincoln scholar is familiar with the perhaps apocryphal story told by Henry Champion Deming, a member of the Connecticut Congress, about the president's understanding of Christianity... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Les-Nouveaux-Cavaliers-de-l-Apocalypse-par-Jean-Pierre-Filiu.php Depuis que Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a été élu président de la République islamique d'Iran, en juin 2005, ses provocations fort peu diplomatiques ont défrayé la chronique internationale. Sa volonté d'effacer Israël de la carte du monde ou son encouragement au programme nucléaire ont nourri les angoisses légitimes et les spéculations stratégiques... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Korean-war-and-American-policy-in-East-Asia.php Bruce Cumings on his books "The Korean War: A History" and "Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power" http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Soviet-Espionage-in-Canada-The-Fred-Rose-Affair.php In the summer of 1943 Fred Rose, a candidate for the Labour Progressive Party, a communist party alias, was elected to the Canadian parliament in a by election in the federal constituency of Cartier, back then a working class district in the heart of Montreal... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Russia-Presidential-Election-democracy-tradition-and-history.php Russia's 2012 presidential election follows the controversial parliamentary poll in December last year which resulted in the declared victory of the ruling United Russia party, albeit with a reduced majority. The December election was notable not for its largely predictable outcome, but for the eruption of the mini Arab-Spring style protest against alleged vote rigging and the reactions that followed... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Canadian-pivot-to-China.php Ever since Goldman Sach's coined the term BRICS to describe the rising economic power of Brazil, Russia, India and China, it has been clear that the twenty-first century will see a radical redistribution of power from the West to the rest of the world, who are not only catching up in terms of development, but may well soon overtake the West... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Matter-of-Mind-Reason-and-Experience-in-the-Age-of-Descartes-by-Christopher-Braider.php Christopher Braider: "The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes" challenges the universal presumption that the decisive turning point in early modern Western literary and intellectual culture was what Richard Rorty has called the dualist ‘invention of the mind.' ... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Red-Road-movie.php Red Road is a movie which uses visuality to create the sensation of touch and most of the time leads the viewer to associate the visual material with sensations of the “haptic”... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Kollontai-fashion-collection.php Interview with fashion designer Gabrielle Tousignant http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Photo-essay-street-photograpy-Mark-Lavorato.php Photography http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/North-Korea-totalitarian-succession-by-Bruce-Cumings.php When Kim Jong Il died on December 17th, I was lucky to be in Singapore. That way I could watch from a salutary distance the froth and drivel that passed for expert American commentary: How can his callow son expect to grapple with octogenarian leaders in the powerful military—won't there be a coup? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Looking-for-Balance-by-Steve-Chan.php Steve Chan: If balance-of-power theory is correct, one should see China's neighbors and other major powers reacting to its rise in the manner predicted. They have not so far, thus presenting an enigma to realism. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Casualities-of-credit-by-Carl-Wennerlind.php In 1696, Sir Isaac Newton left Cambridge for London, putting his scientific and alchemical pursuits temporarily on hold to assume the position of Warden of the Royal Mint. His main responsibility was to investigate and prosecute crimes against the English currency... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-Intelligence-Happens-by-John-Duncan.php Perhaps humanity is overly narcissistic, but few problems are so fascinating to us as our own, complex and intelligent minds. For over a century, debates have raged over so-called intelligence tests, used in schools, in armies, and in the offices of clinical psychologists—what do such tests mean? what do they miss? can a single score capture any of the richness of human nature and talent?... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Cultural-Evolution-How-Darwinian-Theory-Can-Explain-Human-Culture-and-Synthesize-the-Social-Sciences.php Charles Darwin is rightly celebrated for providing, in The Origin of Species, the first workable scientific theory to explain the stunning diversity and complexity of life on earth... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Sources-of-Intentionality-by-Uriah-Kriegel.php ‘The aim of philosophy,' the great American philosopher Wilfred Sellars once wrote, ‘is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Regional-Christ-the-Folk-Saint-Gaucho-Gil.php All over Argentina, his small shrines can be found along roadsides. They are often ramshackle, little more than a crate containing a statue. Sometimes they are painted red or festooned with red ribbons and cloth... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Betty-Shamieh.php Betty Shamieh: Being connected to two cultures, particularly two cultures that are sometimes at war, gives one insight into what is common about all human beings... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/You-comma-Idiot-book-by-Doug-Harris.php "I wrote a book for myself to read. One I would be sure to finish. Now what's left to be seen is whether others feel the same way." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Keith-Miller-Pine-Hill.php Interview with Keith Miller http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Duy-Fashion-Designer-Interview.php Interview with Montreal's fashion designer Duy Nguyen http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Jacks-Room.php My three brothers, eighteen, sixteen, and fourteen years my senior, lived away from home for most of my childhood. Our interaction was limited to their week-end visits to our parents' house, or the occasional longer stay when they would reoccupy their rooms during intervals between schools or apartments... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Wonderland.php In 1991, I left graduate school to take a position teaching in the English department at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, a small agricultural town in the Bighorn Basin east of Yellowstone National Park... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/I-will-find-you-a-wheelbarrow.php Camp Nominingue is a residential wilderness camp in the Laurentians, four hours north of Montreal. Founded in 1925 by the Van Wagner family, and set on 400 acres on the shores of Lac Nominingue, the summer camp is based on the belief that the self-esteem of young boys grows the longer they live in tents and go on canoe trips... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Herb-Selected-Poems-by-Aisa-Alyasiri.php A rare, if not unique, pastoral voice in contemporary Iraqi Arabic poetry, Aisa Alyasiri (residing currently in Canada) was born in 1942 in a village near the city of Amarah in southern Iraq... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Steven-Mayoff-Poetry.php Poetry by Steven Mayoff http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Is-America-the-New-Rome.php On he similarities between the rise of the American state and power and the upsurge of Roman Republic http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Phoebe-and-Edgar-in-the-garden-of-America.php There's an elderberry tree between my house and Edgar's house, in the wash filled with desert grass... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-art-student-manifesto.php My friends and classmates: You may ask yourselves why I have gathered you here today. It has not been long since we last convened; indeed we met only yesterday on the sixteenth of November, a day in many ways like any other... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-couple.php There was always a feeling of surprise, even after six months, at the diminutive size of the office... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-swim-matt-domino.php The wedding was over, so Nick and Stephen decided to stop at the ravine. Nick had heard about it while he was working on a house outside of Waterbury... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Character-of-Russia-by-David-Satter.php For centuries, the Russian traveler, crossing the border, felt an inexplicable lightness, as if an unseen burden had been lifted from his shoulders... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/State-Building-in-Putin-Russia-Policing-and-Coercion-After-Communism-by-Brian-Taylor.php Politics have returned to Russia, with a vengeance. The contested December 2011 parliamentary elections, which were supposed to be an inconsequential stepping stone on Vladimir Putin's triumphant return to the presidency and the Kremlin, instead gave birth to a serious challenge to the ruling regime... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Crisis-of-Russian-Democracy-The-Dual-State-Factionalism-and-the-Medvedev-Succession.php Few of the modernisation tasks facing Vladimir Putin when he came to power in 2000 have been resolved. Indeed, many of the challenges facing the country after Stalin's death in 1953 still remain on the agenda... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Soviet-Fates-and-Lost-Alternatives-by-Stephen-Cohen.php "Truth in reviewing: Steve Cohen was my teacher in graduate school at Princeton and has remained a friend ever since. I don't think, however, that this is the reason I mostly agree with his version of events. I may disagree with this or that interpretation of particular events, but overall this is one of the first books I would put into the hands of someone who wanted to get a good sense of what the Soviet Union was all about." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Arab-Spring-Islam-and-Democracy.php The ongoing process of revolutionary change in the Middle East and North Africa may not have spent all its potential force yet, but even this far, it has altered the world attitude to the region and its political folk culture. In particular, the outcome of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya seem to have dented the claim that the popular alternative to regional dictatorships has to be Islamic fundamentalist regimes bent on suicide bombing the West and depriving the indigenous intelligentsia of the few personal freedoms they enjoy. The notion, still a favourite line of defence of some of the remaining regional dictators, is in fact a relatively recent invention of Islamic extremists who contend that “true Islam” is inherently incompatible with democratic values and institutions... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alaa-Al-Aswany-On-the-State-of-Egypt I first saw Alaa Al Aswany's On the State of Egypt sitting in a bookstore in the U.S. in July 2011. The ‘revolution,' as we were still calling it—‘uprisings' is the more popular term now —was only six months old... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Winter-in-Kazakh-steppe.php TKazakhstan's capital Astana is renowned for its futuristic and eclectic (or ostentatious and jumbled, depending on one's aesthetic) architecture. It also has a more dubious distinction: it's the second coldest capital city in the world. Other cities in northern Kazakhstan are just as chilly. With temperatures often below minus 30 Celsius, David Mould, who teaches media studies at Ohio University, had plenty of time to reflect on the coldest winter of his life during his Fulbright Fellowship in Kazakhstan... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Central-Asia-Frequent-Flyer-by-David-Mould.php When the Soviet Union broke up 20 years ago, its national airline Aeroflot suffered the same fate. From Baku to Bishkek, Tallinn to Tashkent, the governments of cash-strapped new republics seized the aircraft sitting on the tarmac, repainted them in the new national colors and hoped they could round up enough spare parts to keep them flying... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mirroring-People-The-Science-of-Empathy-and-How-We-Connect-with-Others-by-Marco-Iacoboni.php Imagine you are out and about, perhaps doing some shopping, or planning an evening at the movies with friends. Lots of people are around you, coming and going, all busy with their own plans. You look at them, they look at you. Where do you think they are looking, when they look at you?.. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Myth-of-Choice-Personal-Responsibility-in-a-World-of-Limits-by-Kent-Greenfield.php We may be quite aware of various ways we are constrained in life–biology, social norms, authority–but one area we are told embodies robust, unlimited choice is the free market... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Thrift-and-Thriving-in-America-Capitalism-and-Moral-Order-from-the-Puritans-to-the-Present.php Until recently, the word "thrift" had largely disappeared from the active vocabulary of most Americans. Like chastity and temperance, thrift was well on its way to becoming a virtue relic of a bygone era... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Marx-and-Alienation-Essays-on-Hegelian-Themes-Sean-Sayers.php Alienation is a pervasive but puzzling feature of modern life. It is one of the few theoretical terms from Marxism that has entered into ordinary language... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/States-of-War-Enlightenment-Origins-of-the-Political-by-David-Bates.php States of War addresses one of the most pressing concerns of modern democratic states: how to reconcile the foundational drive to defend the nation with the principles of law and civic rights?.. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Think-Evolution-and-the-Rational-Mind-by-Ronald-de-Sousa.php Humans, it has been said since Aristotle, are rational animals. Those who scoff at the phrase misunderstand it as contrasting with irrationality. But the proper contrast is with the non- rational, or arational. Inanimate objects are arational, because it makes no sense to tax them with irrationality. Humans are rational precisely because we are capable of irrationality... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ethical-Project-by-Philip-Kitcher.php Philip Kitcher: "We became fully human when we were able to find ways of inhibiting tendencies to socially disruptive action, ways of reinforcing our altruistic capacities..." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rationality-and-Religious-Commitment-by-Robert-Audi.php Why should there be yet another book in the philosophy of religion, and why should I in particular write one? Rationality and Religious Commitment has grown from a great deal of my work on both these topics... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Stoics-and-the-Epicureans-on-Friendship-Sex-and-Love.php Ancient philosophy - especially after Aristotle - largely focused on how to achieve self-sufficiency on the one hand, and peace of mind on the other; it thus became fundamentally therapeutic, in nature and goal... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-essay-Toward-a-New-Narrative-Nonfiction.php The essay is perhaps the most accessible and democratic of all forms of writing. All it requires is a thesis and a discussion; the rest is up to the authors to present creatively their ideas and arguments... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Russia-Elections-Vladimir-Putin-Democracy-Derailed-Steve-Fish.php Russia's parliamentary elections conform to well-established patterns of arbitrary exclusion of opposition candidates and intimidation and manipulation of opposition forces. Given the exclusion, cooptation, and intimidation of oppositionists in Russia, many people who might be inclined to compete for office in more open polities simply do not choose to do so in Russia. Thus, we cannot know for sure who would have contested these elections if Russia had a more open system... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Iran-and-Republican-Presidential-Candidates.php In U.S. presidential politics the “threat” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran has emerged as a potent political issue comparable to Saddam Hussein's Iraq and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD ) in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Superstition-as-Ideology-in-Iranian-Politics-From-Majlesi-to-Ahmadinejad-by-Ali-Rahnema.php Ali Rahnema on his new book "Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics: From Majlesi to Ahmadinejad": "Majlesism as a religio-political ideology is based on two axial premises. First, that the human mind is defective and subsequently incapable of addressing and resolving everyday problems. Second, that in the absence of the common folk's ability to make correct and worthy decisions, society requires the leadership of a King and/or of a religious jurist with a connection to the hidden world..." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Blue-notes-in-black-and-white-by-Benjamin-Cawthra.php The music came first, then the photographs. But what images they are: a sculptural Dexter Gordon bathed in cigarette smoke... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Michelangelo-the-artist-the-man-and-his-times-by-William-Wallace.php Michelangelo Buonarroti is universally recognized to be among the greatest artists of all time... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Gospel-of-Thomas-and-Christian-Origins.php André Gagné: "The Gospel of Thomas is not a “heretical” writing and should not be placed under the modern category of Gnosticism. Like the traditional New Testament writings, Thomas is also concerned with the reception and transmission of the words and teachings of Jesus..." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Gravity-ghost-scientific-discovery-in-the-21-century-by-Harry-Collins.php How do scientists decide they have discovered something? Gravity's Ghost is a detective story about a potential discovery called 'the Equinox Event'. At the same time, it's an investigation of the nature of science... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Capitalism-A-Very-Short-Introduction-by-James-Fulcher.php One way or another capitalism will continue on its crisis-prone way, the solution to one crisis begetting another. There is no final crisis and no final solution to crisis... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Max-Frisch.php One hundred years ago Max Frisch was born in Zurich. He died twenty years ago in the same city. In between he got out and travelled widely, and in 1952 lived in the US and Mexico on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. His journeying shaped his writing, both novels and plays, providing exotic settings but also locales deliberately far removed from his birthplace... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Death-book-by-Todd-May.php Each of us will die. Sooner or later, each of you reading this words, as well as I who write them, will be dead. This fact about us affects our lives perhaps more profoundly than any other fact about us... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Gustav-Klimt-the-kiss.php I have never seen a painting as tender and vibrant as Gustav Klimt's oil on canvas painting, “The Kiss.” To me, “The Kiss,” circa 1907-08, enacts a perfect transaction between two people with hearts so full of love that the world around them bursts in flamboyant, colorful life... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-cooperative-species-human-reciprocity-and-its-evolution-by-Bowles-and-Gintis.php Cooperation was prominent among the suite of behaviors that marked the emergence of behaviorally modern humans in Africa... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-last-superstition-a-refutation-of-the-new-atheism-Edward-Feser.php The central contention of the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens is that there has for several centuries been a war between science and religion... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-ceasing-to-be-human.php Ceasing to be human is a fugitive event; it can't be captured by a single narrative or conceptual context. Perhaps the proper way to pursue the matter is by way of historical inquiries into the forms and occasions of its appearance... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Portraits-and-persons-by-Cynthia-Freeland.php As a philosopher I ask different questions about portraits than art historians... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Starring-New-York-filming-the-crime-and-the-glamour-of-the-long-1970s.php I began researching Starring New York before I finished my prior book, Cowboys as Cold Warriors. In that book I considered a group of film westerns in their relationships to U. S. Cold War culture and politics from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. As I developed that project, I saw how those narratives... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-monopoly-took-over-a-sport.php The summer of 2011 marked 20 years since Dance Smartly, a magnificent Canadian 3-yr-old filly, cake-walked down the home stretch of Woodbine racetrack in Toronto... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Last-Lion.php Short story by B. Newmark http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Guelph-in-the-afternoon.php To tell the truth. To remain within nodding distance of the facts, which run away from you effortlessly. To drive after them living people, who are much more unwilling and in the end disappointing than imaginary ones, who can show up anywhere, adopt any pose, pull off speeches of shattering brevity, and do not lie to you... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-first-heartbreak.php My mother had her favorites: dark chocolate, lightly salted cashews, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Diamond, silver jewelry, Shalimar perfume, black coffee, red wine, the Chicago Cubs... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Poetry-Lauren-Nicole-Nixon.php Poetry by L.N.Nixon http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Borges-and-Calvino-Race-for-Blood-Sausage.php On a hot summer day in 1967, the blind and infirm Jorge Luis Borges challenged his healthier and much younger protégé, Italo Calvino... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/I-was-16-Rwanda.php I was 16 in 1994. I remember I had a crush on a girl at my high school named Stacy... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Poets-Corner.php First let me tell you what I'm not referring to. I'm not referring to that section of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey where poets, playwrights and writers from Chaucer to Hughes are buried or commemorated under plaques or white marble busts... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Strange-Non-Death-of-Neoliberalism-by-Colin-Crouch.php The viability of western democracy is now being put to a severe test: can the economic crisis be tackled in a way that recognizes the situation of the great majority of the population, or must the interests of the banks who caused the crisis in the first place through their irresponsible use of secondary markets always be privileged?... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/One-Illness-Away-by-Anirudh-Krishna.php Is it possible to prevent or forestall poverty? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Institutional-Revolution.php Book review http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Red-Star-Over-Iraq-by-Johan-Franzen.php To many people hearing the phrase Middle East politics, and in particular Iraqi politics, conjures up images of sectarian strife, tribal and clan loyalties, and persecution of ethnic minorities... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tunisia-success-heralds-a-testing-time-for-Egypt.php Tunisians made history on October 23rd this year by taking part in the regions first free and fair elections that were held in the backdrop of the Arab Spring... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Inner-rhythm.php Gabriel Hunt filched one of the stuffed grape leaves his wife, Caroline, had made for the dinner-dance tonight... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-stranger-in-the-snow.php After Jodie Johnston left Nevada with Johnny on his bus, she called from hotels the mornings after shows, excited and eager to report... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Inuit-art-of-Ruben-Komangapik.php “When I'm lost in my art – I'm at home,” says Ruben Anton Komangapik, contemporary Inuit artist... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Art-and-process-with-Noa-Kaplan.php Robin Tung interview with the media artist and designer Noa Kaplan http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Coco-Chanel-by-Linda-Simon.php Even people with little interest in high fashion know the name Chanel—a name synonymous with sophistication and glamour... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-art-for-arts-sake.php 'Art for art's sake' is a much misunderstood phrase. In the public imagination it is invariably the oriflamme of Decadents and Aesthetes... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-dialectics-of-seeing-Walter-Benjamin-and-the-Arcades-Project.php A Review on Susan Buck Morss' “The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project” http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Contracting-peacekeeping-operations-to-the-private-sector.php For as long as humans have fought wars, there have been those willing to kill, and to risk their lives, for profit... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-science-of-evil-by-Simon-Baron-Cohen.php When we try to explain acts of human cruelty, there is no scientific value in the term 'evil' but there is scientific value in using the term 'empathy erosion'... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-last-utopia-by-Samuel-Moyn.php The Last Utopia assesses how deeply rooted in history the notion of “international human rights” is... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Depth-an-account-of-scientific-explanation-Michael-Strevens.php Humanity's single greatest achievement is, perhaps, to understand something about the way that the world really works... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Libya-the-future-of-a-revolution.php Although revolutionary forces succeeded in capturing the main urban centers of Libya and killing Muammar Gaddafi, the ultimate outcome of the civil war is far from certain. Is conflict really at an end? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/About-to-die-book-review-by-Barbie-Zelizer.php Death has long been seen as the ultimate equalizer, yet its depiction in the news takes shape across unequal parameters... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/William-Lychack-Poetry.php Poetry by William Lychack http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-struggle-for-power-in-Syria-Nikolaos-van-Dam.php Bashar al-Asad is not going to sign his own death warrant. A scenario of reconciliation South African style does not seem to be possible... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Dignity-the-essential-role-it-plays-in-resolving-conflict-Donna-Hicks.php While we all have a deep and abiding desire to be treated well and to be recognized as worthy, our lack of awareness and understanding of the many ways we routinely violate each other's dignity is wreaking havoc on our lives and our relationships... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-real-real-thing-Wendy-Steiner.php Any creation story is a story about models, for as King Lear reminds us, “Nothing can come of nothing..." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-poverty-of-Clio-Boldizzoni.php Since the 1970s, economics has entered a phase of aggression toward the other social sciences that is defined by its own creators as “economic imperialism..." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conservatism-Kieron-OHara.php Defining conservatism is surprisingly hard... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-book-forged-in-hell-Steven-Nadler.php The Theological-Political Treatise was regarded by Spinoza's contemporaries as the most dangerous book ever published... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Psychology-and-Catholicism.php Relationships between sciences and religions are a thorny issue in our day... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-protestant-ethic-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism.php The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber is one of the world's most famous studies in social science, competing for the first place with works such as Capital by Karl Marx and Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Travel-and-habit-in-Merleau-Ponty-and-Proust.php Travel and Habit in Merleau-Ponty and Proust http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-fruit-the-tree-and-the-serpent-by-Lynne-Isbell.php How did we get to the point where we miss the smells that a dog experiences but we see the rest of life in fine, colorful detail and depth?... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/We-Cant-All-Be-Gods.php When my best friend Nigel and I were fourteen we started a band. Neither of us played a musical instrument. So my father took promo photos for us instead... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/bobo.php My brother Bobby and I looked up from the Nintendo. Our parents had given us the new game console for Christmas, and we had been glued to the television set ever since... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-crisis-of-capitalist-democracy-Richard-Posner.php My book will soon be two years old. But I don't think it has dated. What has happened since it was published is more of the same: more depression, more federal deficit, more political stalemate, more retreat from stimulus, more doubts about the Administration's handling of the crisis... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Freedom-and-the-laws-of-nature.php One of the central projects of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been the attempt to reconcile our self-image as human beings with the picture of the world emerging from the natural sciences... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-the-origin-of-stories.php Why do we love fiction? http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Boredom.php Yes you do. There's nothing left to believe in anymore. All is fiction. Somehow, we have to invent our own reality... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Between-sense-and-de-Kooning-by-Richard-Shiff.php Even as he became a celebrity in the world of art, Willem de Kooning took pride in remaining an ordinary man, living (he liked to say) as he had when he was unknown and poor... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-art-and-war-and-terror.php ‘Poetry makes nothing happen,' said the poet W. H. Auden. How wrong he was... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Dialogues-between-faith-and-reason.php Dialogues tells a story about how we got to where we are and hopes that the very telling of that story will help create a way for readers themselves to engage in reasonable dialogues about matters of faith... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mindreading-animals.php Anyone who has ever lived with a dog or a cat (or any other intelligent social animal) will attest to the occasional uncanny feeling that one's pet knows what one is thinking... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Frans-Hals.php As the Metropolitan Museum's curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings for the past thirty-one years I know the collection's 230 Dutch pictures (those dating ca. 1600-1800) as well as I would if they were hanging in my own house... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-I-write.php I'm lonely but I dislike the company of other people and this puts me in a Hellbox... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Taking-movies-seriously.php Film and Philosophy: Taking Movies Seriously is a brief overview of the history of philosophizing about film, which begins with a survey of early film theorists that had a philosophical bent (like Munsterberg and Eisenstein) and with profiles of the two most significant writers in the field so far, Stanley Cavell and Noel Carroll... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-blindness-of-the-heart-Julia-Franck-book-review.php Prologues and epilogues, so often skimmed and scanned, demand closer inspection if the novel they frame purports or has proven to offer a longer, worthier shelf-life than its run-of-the-mill rivals... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Our-buick-stopped-here.php Short story by Lee Matthew Goldberg (September, 2011) http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Absent-sunshine.php Poetry by Sharon Siegel http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Caleb.php Short story by Andrew MacQuarrie http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Simon-Perchik-Poetry.php Poems by Simon Perchik http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Norway-terror-attaks.php Mid-July in Oslo is generally a very quiet time, as much of the city's population leaves in order to embark on the summer holiday season... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Covered-bridges-in-the-Quebec-countryside.php The news stories that flooded front pages in the wake of Hurricane Irene late last month focused mostly on surging rivers, torn-up homes, downed trees, and the fate of New York City... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-neuroscience-tells-us-about-morality.php Self-preservation is embodied in our brain's circuitry: we seek food when hungry, warmth when cold, and sex when lusty... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/on-intelligence.php Although I recognized the concept of intelligence from an early age, it wasn't until high school that I realized that being smart meant more than getting good grades, and that different people could be smart in different ways... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alfred-Stieglitz-a-legacy-of-light.php In Stieglitz: A Beginning Light, Katherine Hoffman focused on the early years of Alfred Stieglitz's (1864–1946) career and his European roots... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-clash-of-ideas-in-world-politics-john-owen.php The Arab Awakening – the chain of rebellions and revolutions that have rocked the Arab world since last December – has riveted the attention of people the world over... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Age-of-fracture-Daniel-Rodgers.php In the midst of a heated political discussion, you may still hear it said that ideas don't matter... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Blind-Spots-Bazerman-and-Tenbrunsel.php During the trying times that have followed the financial collapse of 2008, a long list of culprits has been blamed: homebuyers, mortgage lenders, bankers, Congress, and the Bush administration... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-welfare-state-and-the-rise-of-paternalism.php We live in increasingly paternalistic societies; almost every day, somewhere in the developed world, a new law regulates what people can eat, drink, smoke, view, or read... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Kantian-ethics-and-economics.php A Review of Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-invention-of-market-freedom.php Through most of human history the word “freedom” has been used to distinguish the members of a social and political elite from those classes of people – women, slaves, serfs, menial laborers, and foreigners – who do not enjoy their privileges or share their ethos... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Toward-a-Buddhist-politics-of-freedom.php There is a central teaching in certain schools of Mahayana Buddhist metaphysics that all phenomena are shunya , or empty of inherent existence... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Neither-beast-nor-God.php The dignity of the human person http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-politics-of-inequality-in-Russia.php The Politics of Inequality in Russia is a study of the political processes underlieing the steady rise in inequality observed in Russia since the end of the Soviet regime... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Kantian-ethics-and-economics.php My father was an enigma to everyone, his three children not excepted. Perhaps even to himself... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Something-Tolstoyan.php There was a man who beat his children. His name was Hans Holder... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Darwin-Conjecture.php Social scientists have been wary of applying Darwin's ideas. In our book "Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution" (published 2010 by the University of Chicago Press) we argue that these misgivings are ungrounded... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Human-Dignity.php My book is a defense of human dignity. I mean that it is a defense of the equal status of individuals or persons vis-à-vis one another, and a defense of the superior stature of the human species vis-à-vis all others species... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Economic-Origins-of-Roman-Christianity.php The Roman Catholic Church, a principal world religion today in competition with other Christian faiths, had, by 1600, achieved dominance over huge swaths of Europe... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Jane-Austen.php Somewhere near the middle of "Why Jane Austen?", a book that combines literary and cultural criticism with recollections of teaching and travel and anecdotes about friends, neighbors, and strangers, I describe a gathering of Jane Austen fans I attended some years ago in England... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-inviolableking-of-Morocco.php When falling for short term gains to impede long-term retributions happen to be the way forward... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sickness-and-health.php Many affairs of this life are fueled by money but one doesn't think about it unless the gas runs out... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-current-crisis-and-the-essence-of-capitalism.php The worldwide economic downturn is no short-term blip but a full-fledged crisis of capitalism. Amid the din of commentary and political posturing, it's appropriate to return to first principles for a better understanding of the crisis. What are these principles? The answer requires a foray into history. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Hebrew-republic.php It has become commonplace to attribute the rise of modern political thought in the West to a process of “secularization.” In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, so the story goes, political thought was fundamentally Christian, an exercise in applied theology... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Evangelical-Christians-deists-and-America-founding.php On New Year's Day of 1802, the Baptist evangelist John Leland delivered a remarkable gift to the White House: a 1,235 block of cheese... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Graham-Greene-and-I-were-wrong.php Graham Greene was wrong about Vietnam. Not in the main, of course. The Quiet American (1955) still stands as not only the inaugural novel of the American intervention in Vietnam but also as a brilliant exposition on why we were destined to fail... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-writing-life-Mayoff.php The writing life of the Canadian author Steven Mayoff. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Great-Lakes-Foundry.php Short story by James Robison http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Cookies.php Short story by Lee Matthew Goldberg http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Bombay-Islam.php Along an alleyway amid a shanty town in the old port district of Bombay where in the nineteenth century the great steamship company P and O built its vast dockyard stands a shrine to an African holy man. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/14-degrees-southern-latitude.php After flying in a two-engine job from Pago Pago (that cheap t-shirt of a town) to Apia , capitol of Western Samoa, a local merchant showed me a series of postcards... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Design-and-truth.php Perhaps the two most salient aspects of our humanity are our ability to communicate and our ability to design... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Jane-Austen-education.php The idea that reading books can change your life has not been very fashionable this last century or so. It violates the high-modernist principle of art for art's sake, smacks of Victorian moralizing and self-improvement... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Anatheism.php Richard Kearney's Anatheism: Returning to God after God investigates the possibility of a God after God (ana-theos)... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Barbarous-Philosophers.php In his book The Invention Of Peace Michael Howard quotes the nineteenth century English jurist, Sir Henry Maine. “It is not peace which was natural and primitive and old, but rather war. War appears to be as old as mankind but peace is a modern invention… Not only is war to be seen everywhere but it is war more atrocious than we, with our ideas, can easily conceive...” http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Scotland-goes-down-the-Quebec-road.php Scotland is a heavily-urbanised but post-industrial nation which voluntarily renounced its status as an independent nation-state to merge with its larger and more powerful southern neighbour England in 1707... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Demystifying-Syria.php Syria remains poorly understood, despite the pivotal role it plays in the contemporary Middle East... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Origins-of-political-extremism.php Political extremism is one of the most pernicious, destructive, and nihilistic forms of human expression. During the twentieth century, in excess of 100 million people had their lives taken from them as the result of extremist violence... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Radical-democracy-and-political-theology.php Unbeknownst to many, the world is undergoing a monumental change with regard to the understanding and practice of the proper relationship between religion and politics... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Adam-Smith-radical-and-egalitarian.php A few years ago, I published a book with this title, responding to a question posed by Gordon Brown... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Origins-of-Business-Money-and-Markets.php Prior to The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets, nobody has ever described how business, the practice of selling at a profit, first began... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/fairness-and-the-social-contract.php It seems that fairness is an idea whose time has come. True, some cynics view fairness as nothing more than a mask for self-interest. But the cynics are wrong... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Does-Science-Contradict-Religion.php Many people, these days, hold the opinion that religion and science conflict; in some deep way they are opposed to each other... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-Mao-to-Market.php It was late autumn 1968. Trudging through the snow along Rue de la Montagne in Montreal as the day drew to a close, I met up with an old family friend... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Enlargement-of-Life.php The title comes from Santayana, writing in Three Philosophical Poets of “a steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth. Such a contemplation is imaginative. No one can reach it who has not enlarged his mind and tamed his heart..." http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-literature-teaches-us-about-emotion.php An Essay on What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Was-America-Founded-as-a-Christian-Nation.php Books: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction. http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alienated-and-Engaged-Muslims-in-the-West.php Book excerpt http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the-tunnel.php Book Review http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Imagine-living-through-the-progress.php Essay by Mike Mercer http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/on-personality.php Essay by the poet Michael Milburn http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Iran-continuing-challenge-in-a-time-of-Arab-turmoil.php The Islamic Republic of Iran presents a wide range of challenges in a region that is already plagued by insecurity and conflict... http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-comrades-to-enemies.php Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance.