This is a week when I’ve been thinking about old friends who are, as it happens, ex-friends. Maybe it’s a special category of friendship. I’ve devoted a recent column to David, who was a valued philosophical colleague. Together we shared … Continue reading → The post Where Are the Ex-Friends Now? appeared first on Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
A Good Look at an Old Evil | The title of this column plays off my first book, A Good Look at Evil. There I revisited some of the main...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
The other day I scanned the internet for news of ex-friends who’d stayed significant in my memory. “We quarreled,” as French philosopher Sartre said about one former friend, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, “a quarrel does not matter. It’s just one more … Continue reading → The post Ave Atque Vale (Hail and Farewell) appeared first on Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
Doran Spielman’s When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David Is the Bible a history book? Did the stories in it (or some of the more literal-sounding ones) really happen? Or are we modern people obliged … Continue reading → The post When the Stones Speak appeared first on Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
The Fork in the Road | A realization visited me the other day. It had to do with lost friendships. I’d always pictured these...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
In Liaisons Dangereuses, the eighteenth-century epistolary novel of cynicism by Choderlos de Laclos, the plot turns around two aristocrats who co-conspire to seduce their unsuspecting victims. Their purpose is not so much to gratify sexual desire as to enjoy the … Continue reading → The post Women Enemies and Women Friends appeared first on Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
The Story | “The crucial thing is the story.” That is what I claim in A Good Look at Evil, my book which holds that the person who...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
The other night I had a dream in which I met a woman whom I used to regard as a friend. But she’d become an ex-friend – in the following fashion. An ill-wisher who’d known me from my earliest days … Continue reading → The post In Quest of Lost Friendship appeared first on Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me | Some years back I read a book with the title, And the Wolves Howled: Fragments of Two Lifetimes...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
Readers of this column may recall that I had a near-death experience fairly recently. Not the good kind, where you meet all the dear ones who’ve gone before you up the golden stairway. Rather, the kind where you get to … Continue reading → The post Death and the Doctors appeared first on Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
My book, A Good Look at Evil, doesn’t describe the best-known bad actors in human history. The cases I deal with are mostly of near-contemporaries. And, when dictators are discussed, it’s usually through their effects on people who executed their … Continue reading → The post Do Evil People Get Better at Evil If They Reincarnate? appeared first on Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column.| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
The Puzzle of Hannah Arendt | The career of Hannah Arendt is surely one of the oddest on record. Doubt has been cast on claims for which...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
What Is Truth? | The question, famously put to Jesus by Pontius Pilate, was prompted by Jesus’ self-report that he had come to bear witness...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
A Writer's Conscience | I just finished reading – actually skimming – what I’m tempted to name as the worst book in the history of the...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
Created over the course of several decades, Phil Tippett’s Mad God delivers a powerful movie watching experience. Especially when it comes to one scene in particular…| Slow Burn Horror
