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
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
In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists’ prior expectations. The three discuss what it means … Continue reading "152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)"| Recall This Book
Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up–we inflict it on our peers, we i…| Recall This Book
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