BY MARIA POPOVA “Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote in her beautiful elegy for her soul mate, “is only a report.” To fully feel life course through us, indeed, we ought to befriend our own attention, that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator.” More than half a century before Oliver, another enchantress of the human spirit — the French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3,…

I.  Critical Theories of the Early SocialistsIn the wake of the French Revolution, numerous theories began to circulate in Europe that sought both to respond to demands for social justice unanswered by the French Revolution and to correct the dramatic economic imbalances brought about by the spread of the industrial revolution.The democratic gains following the…

A. S. Hamrah’s review of Michael Mann’s Ferrari   In A. S. Hamrah’s review of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, published this morning on the NYR Online, he describes the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 paean to machines:  He demanded glorious deaths in car crashes, and lauded war and destruction. “Time and space died yesterday!” Marinetti screamed. “We declare that…

Yascha Mounk and Martha Nussbaum discuss how to reflect on a life lived well. Feb 3 Martha Nussbaum is a philosopher and the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Nussbaum is the author of many books, including, most recently, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. In this…

On the unintended consequences of anti-nuclear zealotry. Quico Toro and Guido Núñez-Mujica Feb 2 Police officers stand in front of a former nuclear power plant during an anti-AFD protest in November 2020. (Photo by Ina Fassbender / AFP via Getty Images.) Last month, hundreds of thousands of Germans marched against the far right, as more…