Book Culture 2025 #2

    Reality, considered in itself and as a whole, is a chaos so deep and immense that it exceeds any possibility of being understood or experienced. Even something as small as a pebble, if we consider it to the full extent of its existence, becomes a mystery beyond comprehension. We can detect only a fragment of this chaos, as filtered by our perceptive apparatus and cognitive limits. Through our imagination, based on our personal inclinations and on the cosmological assumptions of our society, we mould this remaining piece into one of the infinite forms that reality can take. This activity of the imagination provides us with a cosmos, a 'world': a place where we can develop those structures of sense that shelter us from the trauma of having been thrown unprepared into a mortal life. Then, spurred by the force of habit and by a desire for comfort, we become progressively convinced that the world we have constructed is an accurate picture of 'nature,' and that reality coincides with the metaphysical consensus of a particular society at a certain moment in history. We tend to forget the imaginary essence of the 'world' that we see around ourselves, and we start drawing hard distinctions between what we seen as 'truly existing' and what we set aides as 'mere fantasy.' (4)

    This, too, is a timely lesson: if rational languages, such as philosophy and science, aim to offer a structure of sense for human life, they must recognize themselves, at least in part, as forms of literature. If they want to make their hard logical kernel inhabitable by living creatures, they should not overlook the need to translate into the soft substance of narrative. (10)

    Since the infinite chaos of reality will always exceed the limits of any conceptual system, we should recognize that all of our attempts at reducing it to a meaningful cosmos are merely 'likely stories' - like the eikos mythos of Plato's Timaeus - at once plagued by, and endowed with, the porous quality of literature. Every conceptual world that we might devise is ultimately a story for us to live by, and the better ones are not those that reach closer to an absolute truth beyond our grasp, but those that are spacious and flexible enough to offer an imaginary home where a dignified life for all becomes possible. (10 - 11)
Campagna, Frrederico. Otherworldly: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History. Bloomsbury, 2025.

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Abrams, Nathan. "Kubrick's World: Power, Paranoia, and the Politics of the Human Condition." International Horizons (October 28, 2025) ["In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick’s fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick’s cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot." Weird Studies #77 (July 8, 2020) ["'What a fool believes he sees, no wise man can reason away.' This line from a Doobie Brothers song is probably one of the most profound in the history of rock-'n'-roll. It is profound for all the reasons (or unreasons) explored in this discussion, which lasers in on just one of the major trumps of the traditional tarot deck, that of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the world, yet stands outside it. The Fool is an idiot but also a sage. The Fool does not know; s/he intuits, improvises a path through the brambles of existence. We intend this episode on the Fool to be the first in an occasional series covering all twenty-two of the major trumps of the Tarot of Marseilles." List of books mentioned/discussed on the page.]

Gourgouris, Stathis. "On Edward Said's Orientalism." Writ Large (November 8, 2022) ["Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same name, Orientalism. In his critique, he challenged Europeans’ construction of the so-called “East,” laid bare the biases of Orientalist study, and transformed the course of humanities scholarship. Stathis Gourgouris is a professor of classics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of books such as Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era."]

Grady, Constance. "The right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings. But they don’t understand it." Vox (October 31, 2025) ["Among the many humiliations of being American in the current moment is this: Members of the tech right and the conservative ruling class continually fetishize objects of nerd culture while also displaying a willful inability to grasp the very basic messages those objects are sending. While there are certainly worse problems (e.g. white nationalism in the White House), the blazing lack of reading comprehension from people who are allegedly smart does give one pause. Put simply, these people are bad nerds."]

Lahr, John. "Every Blink." The London Review of Books (October 23, 2025)  [A review of Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design by Walter Murch. Book description: "Highly lauded film editor, director, writer and sound designer Walter Murch reflects on the six decades of cinematic history he has been a considerable contributor to - and on what makes great films great.
Together with Francis Coppola and George Lucas, Murch abandoned Hollywood in 1969 and moved to San Francisco to create the Zoetrope studio. Their vision was of a new kind of cinema for a new generation of film-goers. Murch's subsequent contributions in film editing rooms and sound-mixing theatres were responsible for ground-breaking technical and creative innovations. In this book, Murch invites readers on a voyage of discovery through film, with a mixture of personal stories, meditations on his own creative tactics and strategies, and reminiscences from working on The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Lucas' American Grafitti, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley. Suddenly Something Clicked is a book that will change the way you watch movies."]

Like Stories of Old. "The Problem of Other Minds – How Cinema Explores Consciousness." (Posted on Youtube: May 31, 2018) ["How have films engaged the problem of other minds? In this video essay, I discuss cinematic explorations into consciousness in the context of the cognitive revolution that has challenged many of the basic assumptions about what was for a long time believed to be a uniquely human trait." Uses Frans de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: "Hailed as a classic, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition--in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos--to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we've underestimated their abilities for too long. Did you know that octopuses use coconut shells as tools, that elephants classify humans by gender and language, and that there is a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame? Fascinating, entertaining, and deeply informed, de Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal--and human--intelligence."]

Stonebridge, Lyndsey. "Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience." Recall This Book (September 4, 2025) ["Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing."]

Stoop, Daan. "Peter Singer and Fifty Years of Animal Liberation." The Philosopher (June 4, 2025) ["In 2023’s Animal Liberation Now, the revised edition of Animal Liberation, Singer replaces outdated examples with new ones that are just as appalling. He calls the chapters on animal testing and industrial farming ‘shocking, both then and now’. Yet this grimness doesn’t prevent him from staying clear-headed. ‘I deliberately avoid emotional language,’ he once told The Guardian. ‘I’ve never considered myself an animal lover and I don’t want to speak only to animal lovers. I want people to see this as a fundamental moral wrong.’ Animal Liberation Now describes how old battery cages were replaced by ‘enriched’ ones; and how lab animals, while now somewhat better protected, are still used on a massive scale. The logic of exploitation remains: animals are still treated as machines that convert cheap feed into profitable meat. What appears to be progress often turns out to be merely cosmetic."]

Walter, Shoshanna. "Rehab: An American Scandal." New Books in Drugs, Addiction, and Recovery (November 8, 2025) ["In Rehab: An American Scandal (Simon and Schuster, 2025), Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter exposes the country’s failed response to the opioid crisis, and the malfeasance, corruption, and snake oil which blight the drug rehabilitation industry. Our country’s leaders all seem to agree: People who suffer from addiction need treatment. Today, more people have access to treatment than ever before. So why isn’t it working? The answer is that in America—where anyone can get addicted—only certain people get a real chance to recover. Despite record numbers of overdose deaths, our default response is still to punish, while rehabs across the United States fail to incorporate scientifically proven strategies and exploit patients. We’ve heard a great deal about the opioid crisis foisted on America by Big Pharma, but we’ve heard too little about the other half of this epidemic—the reason why so many remain mired in addiction. Until now. In this book, you’ll find the stories of four people who represent the failures of the rehab-industrial complex, and the ways our treatment system often prevents recovery. April is a black mom in Philadelphia, who witnessed firsthand how the government’s punitive response to the crack epidemic impeded her own mother’s recovery—and then her own. Chris, a young middle-class white man from Louisiana, received more opportunities in his addiction than April, including the chance to go to treatment instead of prison. Yet the only program the judge permitted was one that forced him to perform unpaid back-breaking labor at for-profit companies. Wendy is a mother from a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, whose son died in a sober living home. She began investigating for-profit treatment programs—yet law enforcement and regulators routinely ignored her warnings, allowing rehab patients to die, again and again. Larry is a surgeon who himself struggled with addiction, who would eventually become one of the first Suboxone prescribers in the nation, drawing the scrutiny of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Together, these four stories illustrate the pitfalls of a system that not only fails to meet the needs of people with addiction, but actively benefits from maintaining their lower status. They also offer insight into how we might fix that system and save lives."]

Warner, Melanie. "Pandora’s Lunchbox: Pulling Back the Curtain On How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal." Democracy Now (March 1, 2013) ["We look deep inside the $1-trillion-a-year “processed-food-industrial complex” to examine how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the world. The vitamins added back to this packaged and fast food — which amounts to 70 percent of calories consumed in the United States — come from nylon, sheep grease and petroleum. We are joined by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of “Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.”"]