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Was Martin Heidegger Hitler's most willing executioner or the 20th century's greatest philosopher? Is it possible he was both? Imagine what it takes to answer that question honestly. Heidegger's prose is notoriously difficult. To his critics, wresting clarity from Being and Time is like trying to inhale the proverbial smoke from the mirror. (His ...

A petition has been circulated on behalf of Roman Polanski—henceforth, to my mind, ''RoPo''—and signed by A-list movie directors (Pedro Almodovar, Wes Anderson,  Martin Scorsese, Wong Kar Wai, David Lynch). Here it is, briefly annotated:We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski's arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon ...

Forgive me if I don’t linger on the man’s music.Thriller was released on November 30, 1982, but it was an album of 1983. The label led with the single “This Girl Is Mine” before releasing “Billie Jean” on January 3. “Billie Jean” was an instant hit for Jackson, but full beatification and canonization was yet to come. On March 25, 1983, NBC aired ...

''They lived in squares and loved in triangles.''  About the Bloomsbury group.  Heard it on the BBC's ''Start the Week'' podcast, which is as good an hour of free audio as you can possibly find.

Ah, here's what happened to Bill Forsyth. A lovely article/interview.  

In the late '70s and early '80s, a Scottish filmmaker named Bill Forsyth made a handful of whimsical comedies.  After shooting a number in and around Glasgow, Forsyth moved on to Hollywood, where he adapted Marylyn Robinson’s acclaimed novel Housekeeping; cut a deft little gem with Burt Reynolds (and a script by John Sayles) called Breaking ...

''The true democracy ... where all journey down the open road. Where a soul is known at once in its going. Not by its clothes or appearance. Not by its family name. Not even by its reputation. Not by works at all. The soul passing unenhanced, passing on foot, and being no more than itself.''  —D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman On this week’s ...

I enjoyed Agger’s palate cleansers. But I couldn’t think of any for myself. I was a dutifully dreary Springsteen-head in high school, and about every three or four years, I plunge back in, bellowing along to ''Thunder Road'' and making muscles in the shaving mirror. Whatever this cleanses, it cannot be the palate.I have another ...

The very day I began vegetable gardening—a day on which I began to heal the split between what I think and what I do; in which I commingled my identity as producer and citizen—I drove down the Taconic Parkway, picked up my Sunday Times, and read Michael Pollan's essay exhorting 2 million like-minded Bobos to take up gardening to ''heal the split ...