Archtypes: Hook-Ups
The Dogs' Office
By Sacha Mardou
January 4, 2018
More by Sacha Mardou
Winning and Losing at the Great Game of Intimacy
What to call this Anton Chekhov, whom I first encountered in 1988? The Master, perhaps—of vision, decency, modesty, and industry, and, one might hope, in the old game of love.
“Even a Nobody is More Powerful Than You Think”
Predictably, a court in Russia banned the documentary film “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” ruling it “propagates extremism and terrorism”; Russia has named Talankin, the film’s main character, a “foreign agent.”
The Friends of Vintage Flight Visit St. Louis
Friends of Vintage Flight must make strategic decisions when they choose a project, based on the group’s capabilities, the condition of available aircraft, and their historical significance. The Curtiss Robin has a fascinating history as one of the most commercially successful aircraft of the period between the world wars, and began production the year after Lindbergh made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.
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The Woodson Boys
To become good at chess is to master skills that would allow one to succeed in a perfect world. And to lose sight of that world, to forget to dream of how things could be, is to lose a great deal, even if it is in this world that we will always be mired.
Līlā
Defending a liberal arts education is equivalent to celebrating līlā/ play. Enabling and encouraging līlā is more than just desirable, it is necessary. My thesis is thus līlā/ play is the intellectual disposition that enables epistemic humility, which in turn is the central goal of a liberal arts education.
Once Every Seventeen Years
The game here took place on several dimensions. It was, on one hand, a game with time—in the right place at the right moment—and on the other, with fish and bugs, in that moment. Once every seventeen years, maybe this might happen. But it has also become a game with memory, and with writing—and now, with technology.
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The Lessons America Has Taught Me
Fox News Channel’s political anchor Bret Baier’s new book, “The Case for America,” is just in time for the 250th anniversary season. It feels a bit hasty in its composition, which gives a reader the sense that it was a book aimed at a ready market: people who want a book that is positive about the United States at this particularly divisive juncture, when many think the country is on the verge of its third political divorce.
How, After World War II, Vietnam Became the Graveyard of Empires
Other books examine the same subject, though none are quite the same sort of synthesis this book is, a massive history that reads a bit like a massive novel. Indeed, as the accumulation of detailed narrative mounts, the reader finds it more unreal and unfocused, as if, as George Orwell said, in Asia, the closer and more finely tuned the view, the vaguer it gets.
The Man of Tomorrow, a Creation of Yesterday, Meets Us Today
It can be argued that Superman is a fascist symbol, or that he is a reworking of Jesus Christ or the American tall-tale hero, that he embodies the myth of the American Century, the Age of the American, or that he symbolizes the hegemony of American overreach and dominance. He is the quintessential American and the ugly American in the world of the right and the left.
