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  • ‘The Personal Is Political’ is Making Politics More Toxic

    ‘The Personal Is Political’ is Making Politics More Toxic0

    “The personal is political” is a slogan that has been around for a long time, used especially though not exclusively by gender feminists. In practice it has served as an exhortation that people make ideology the sole dimension of their personal identity, that they set aside all other bases on which to evaluate their relations

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  • ‘The Penis as Social Construct’—Spoof Article Gets Published by Academic Journal

    ‘The Penis as Social Construct’—Spoof Article Gets Published by Academic Journal0

    Several years ago, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University and University College in London, decided to demonstrate exactly how nonsensical postmodernist cultural studies had become. To do this, he submitted an article to the postmodernist journal Social Text claiming to demonstrate that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct—in other

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  • ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’: Chesterton’s Beautiful Nightmare

    ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’: Chesterton’s Beautiful Nightmare0

    The endlessly quotable G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was many things in his day: essayist, poet, radio broadcaster, art critic, and novelist. His most popular novel (and my personal favorite) was his novella The Man Who Was Thursday. The book involves rival poets (who serve as archetypes) as they encounter a ring of anarchists who are named

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  • ‘The Last Jedi’ is Awful and Disney is Ruining Star Wars

    ‘The Last Jedi’ is Awful and Disney is Ruining Star Wars0

    In 1964, shortly after the release of Disney’s adaptation of P. L. Travers’ charming 1934 book Mary Poppins, J.R.R. Tolkien sent a letter to one Miss J.L. Curry of Stanford University. In the letter, Tolkien complained about the corrupting influence Walt Disney’s movies had on literary works. “Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his

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  • ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Politicization of Storytelling

    ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Politicization of Storytelling0

    There’s been a disturbance in the franchise: Ambivalence, rather than anticipation, has characterized the online response to Disney’s announcement of the deluge of new Star Wars projects we are to be saturated with over the next several years. And while the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story (scheduled for May) was expected to be

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  • ‘The Hobbit’ Turns 80

    ‘The Hobbit’ Turns 800

    “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” When Tolkien wrote these words, which would become one of the most famous and most memorable opening sentences in all of literature, he could not have known what literary power would be unleashed by his creation of the diminutive hole-dwelling creature, Bilbo Baggins. This year,

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