Tag: reviews
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Mirrors & Myths.
This is the creature there has never been. They never knew it, and yet, nonetheless, they loved the way it moved, its limber neck, its very gaze, mild and serene. Not there, because they loved it, it behaved as though it were. They always left some space. And in that clear unpeopled space they saved…
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Field of Magnetic Impulses.
I would like to be Mercutio. Among his virtues, I admire above all his lightness, in a world full of brutality, his dreaming imagination- as the poet of Queen Mab- and at the same time his wisdom, as the voice of reason amid the fanatical hatreds of Capulets and Montagues. He sticks to the old…
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Pitching SpaceTime
A pitch for the combined reading of Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. In two interlocking review-essays. was roundly rejected. for it featured most alarming graphs. Limits, in math, are a clever, offside approach to concrete integers. If you apply them to functions, they can illuminate indeterminate…
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Their, Their Sex.
My closest school friend turned 24 yesterday (happy b’day, deevan!). I am not scheduled to do so for another five months, but her birthday has always seemed like the onset of mine, splitting the year into neat halves: until June 30 I am 23-and-a-bit; on July 1, I am almost-24. For most of my life…
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The Would-be Medici.
It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. …