Plying the Mind

For years now, I have oscillated between two basic approaches to culture: militancy and monkishness.

Earlier this year, at the cinema, I watched Hamnet (2025) in a state of ambivalence.

Many years ago, I found myself in a discussion about "paraphilic infantilism," a fetish in which an adult pretends to be a baby, dresses like a baby, talks like a baby, adopts the behavior of a baby, and is "cared" for by someone who may also be a sexual…

Un prince (2023) begins with a plant uprooted, gently lifted from the soil.

I.

Éric Rohmer produced a body of work, spanning several decades, so consistent in tone as to have been fully formed almost from the beginning.

In the mid-20th century, the philosopher Erich Fromm developed a useful distinction between having and being, by which he referred to two fundamental modes of existence, to two different kinds of orientation towards self and the world, to two different ki…

In a late-sixteenth century verse letter addressed to a friend, the poet John Donne wrote: “Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; / For, thus friends absent speak.”

“Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.”

“Oh, I love her,” I say of some woman on TV.