A Thinking Reed

  • Of wolf and man

    Thanks to Jeremy for tipping me off to this review by John Gray of philosopher Mark Rowland’s new book The Philosopher and the Wolf. Rowlands lived with a wolf he adopted for many years and learned lessons from him about what it meant to be happy and to be human. He also makes the provocative…

  • Rick rolled

    Quick: name the people who gave the invocations at the last five presidential inaugurations. Four…? Three…? Anyone…? Bueller…? Bueller…? This is something that everyone will forget about on January 21st. Just because a lot of pundits and bloggers are talking about it doesn’t make it hugely important. That said, I don’t think it’ll come as…

  • Friday Metal: Top 8 of ’08

    Is it time to start the inevitable “best of” lists already? Well, I know that you all have been waiting with baited breath for my top heavy metal albums of 2008. I make no claim that these are “the best” in any objective sense, just that they’re the ones I listened to and enjoyed the…

  • Milton and Christian liberty

    Theo Hobson argues that John Milton was a great (and underrated) theorist of a distinctly Christian liberalism. He was a strong proponent of a secular state, but also of a Protestant ethos throughout society: So was he an early “secular liberal”? Not in the dominant contemporary sense, which assumes that politics should be post-religious. He…

  • Ape revolt!

    This piece is both incredible and infuriating. Incredible because it describes in detail how intelligent the orangutans are in devising increasingly sophisticated ways to escape from their jailers (oops-“keepers”) at the San Diego Zoo. Infuriating, well, because such obviously intelligent and social creatures are being held captive against their demonstrated preferences. Really, what is the…

  • Remember Iraq?

    Patrick Cockburn reports on the situation there in the wake of the recently concluded “status of forces” agreement that’s supposed to have US troops out by 2011.

  • Rediscovering Correggio

    The Post had an article this weekend on the nearly forgotten Renaissance master Correggio (a.k.a. Antonio Allegri) who at one time ranked up there with the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo. What makes Correggio stand out is that his work is unconventional, even at times chaotic, by the standards of the day: Correggio’s paintings are…

  • The greening of religion

    At “The Immanent Frame,” Roger Gottlieb gives an overview of “religious environmentalism.” Not religious in the sense that conservatives sometimes say that environmentalism is a religion, but environmental concerns and movements emanating from traditional religions. One provocative claim Gottlieb makes is that, as religions “green,” they move to the left more generally: There is also…

  • Pragmatism and ideology

    In light of all the “Obama the pragmatist” talk, Chris Hayes offers a few words for ideology: But privileging pragmatism over ideology, while perhaps understandable in the wake of the Bush years, misses the point. For one thing, as Glenn Greenwald has astutely pointed out on his blog, while ideology can lead decision-makers to ignore…

  • Huxley, the perennial philosophy, and the scandal of particularity

    Aldous Huxley is best remembered for his chilling depiction of a totalitarian state in Brave New World. I’ve long thought that Huxley’s vision was in many ways more accurate than Orwell’s, at least as far as the West is concerned. We seem more likely to fall for a spiritually dead consumerist dystopia than a boot-on-the-neck…