Most Recent. In Arts & Letters – Spirituality.

Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Bringing the Bard to Tibet

The first Tibetan translations of Shakespeare On April 23, 1616, William Shakespeare died at his home, New Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon. While he was a much-admired playwright in his own time, neither he nor his contemporaries could have anticipated the tremendous impact the Bard would have over the following 405 years: his work has now been performed in at least 140 countries and translated into more than 100 languages. Relatively recently,...

Barton Swaim-The Man They Couldn’t Cancel

Mobs have targeted Jordan Peterson, but he hasn’t lost his university job and his publishers have stuck by him. What’s his secret? The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness” before it, is a comical expression for an ugly cultural pathology. To be canceled—an older, closely related term is “blacklisted”—is to have your public persona or influence assailed, typically by a sizable mob, for some real or perceived offense against progressive...

Mark Edmundson -Teach What You Love

A modest proposal for professors of literature Word is out on the street: the study of literature is dying; English is breathing its last; no more Beowulf, no more Virginia Woolf either. Or not much of it. There are reasons to listen to the auguries. Most of the teaching in English departments now is done by adjuncts. The number of majors is tumbling. The profession’s on fire, and the deans, provosts, and...

Mardean Isaac – Will Self

The half-Jewish English writer’s new drug memoir, ‘Will,’ dives from Hampstead Garden Suburb into an underworld Will Self’s new memoir recounts a youth spent smoking, snorting, injecting; itching, puking, shivering. Looking for drugs, using them, running out and looking for more. Doing work on drugs—and to buy drugs—and failing to work having taken drugs. Meeting and discarding people through drugs. Having sex on drugs, not being able to because of...