Fear of mortality, the fragility of relationships, the beauty lurking in the everyday. These are common themes in modern poetry — cliches, even. Yet in the hands of a master poet, they feel vib...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/How_Philip_Larkin_Cuts_So_Deep.php
Robert Byron’s 'The Road to Oxiana' was a smashing success, but was his other great book on The Great Game, the severely neglected 'lost' classic 'The Station,' in some ways even better?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Station-Athos-Treasure-and-Men-Robert-Byron.php
Many scientists are religious, and consider their beliefs to be entirely rational...
Imagine that a mysteriously powerful scientist offers you choice between two doors...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Praise-of-Reason.php
In a paper I wrote on Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party,' I think in the late-nineties, I started by presenting, in brief, the following facts and numbers...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Katherine-Mansfield-The-Garden-Party.php
Coaching female empowerment to the field in the aftermath of Joseph Kony
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Female-Empowerment-in-Uganda.php
During a recent trip across western Europe by train, my frequent companions were the many strangers, visible outside my train window, who could be seen traversing a vast network of bike paths and...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Walking-and-Bicycling-to-Health.php
David Levy on Montreal's past and present
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/O-Marieville-on-Montreal-Quebec-culture-and-history-change.php
The fates and the fortunes of Miss America winners from 1921 to 2012. Painting: 'Reclamation' by Brat Kunkle
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Miss-America-Winners-List-from-1921-to-2012.php
Henry Hardy's introduction to the Isiah Berlins's essays on the culture in Soviet Union
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Isaiah-Berlin-Essays-on-Soviet-Russia-culture.php
Matt Domino's Mad Men Reviews
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mad-Men-Dark-Shadows.php
Short story by Kelly Fordon.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Opportunity-Cost-short-story-by-Kelly-Stanton.php
It sounds paradoxical, but today it appears that we understand more about the universe than our society...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Organizing-Principles-Behind-Economy-Complex-Systems.php
The role of diplomacy in international relations
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-Enemies-Become-Friends-The-Sources-of-Stable-Peace.php
In his Essays Moral, Literary, and Political, David Hume argued that it is not possible for a competitive political party to "support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of princ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Political-Religion-and-Totalitarian-Ideology.php
Stanley A. Renshon’s psychological portrait of the President Barack Obama and the sources of his policy of redemption.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Barack-Obama-personality-and-the-politics-of-redemption.php
On the origins, escalation and future of war.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Arc-of-War-Origins-Escalation-and-Transformation.php
A review of 'Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism' and 'Plenitude: The Economics of True Wealth'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Troubled-Times-Responses-from-the-Ecological-Left.php
Isaiah Berlin believed that ideas matter, not just as products of the intellect but as producers of systems, guides to overnance, shapers of policy, inspirations of culture and engines of history...
The End of English as World Language?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Until-the-Return-of-Babel.php
On Moshe Arens's 'Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto'
Steven Bilakovics: Democratic politics, the citizen's practice of arguing together, comes in turn to seem oddly out of place in democratic society.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-We-Hate-Politics-But-Love-Democracy.php
Stanley A. Renshon on the politics and policies of the United States
Serbia is headed down the drain-again. Or so the analysts would have you believe. The surprising defeat of Serbia's Western-oriented, pro-reformist President Boris Tadic (47.31%), by the former a...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Serbia-New-President-A-Nationalist-Yes-but-a-Democrat-Too.php
Leslie Gelb: Foreign policy is commonsense, not rocket science.
Excerpted from 'The Souls of the Greeks: An Inquiry' by Michael Davis
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Soul-of-the-Greeks-An-Inquiry.php
The Russian Origins of the First World War
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-the-Importance-of-the-Ottoman-Straits.php
Excerpt from 'Morality and the Movies: Reading Ethics Through Film'
German Jewish refugee Leo Strauss (1899-1973) exercised as much influence on his discipline and on American society as any other political thinker in the second half of the twentieth century...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Leo-Strauss-and-the-Conservative-Movement-in-America.php
Cranach, after God, became Luther's 'senior adviser' in the unfolding of the Protestant Reformation...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Serpent-and-the-Lamb-Cranach-Luther-Reformation.php
It was an album that spawned theses in paper churning departments. It infuriated, puzzled and confused...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Paul-Simon-Graceland.php
Today, Oz is known by practically everyone in the world, but only a rare person is familiar with the artists who wrote its great songs...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Wizard-of-Oz-Remains-a-Symbol-Of-Social-Progress.php
Malcolm Forbes on Katherine Anne Porter's work
Short story by Cooper Sy
http://themontrealreview.com/2009/Starbucks-in-the-University-Library-Short-story.php
Foreign and domestic policy become difficult to disentangle. Contrary to the current conventional wisdom about the advantages of authoritarian states, American soft power and its open society may...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Future-of-Power-Joseph-Nye.php
Alexis de Tocqueville is often quoted as a sort of Olympian oracle, lofty and impersonal...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tocqueville-Discovery-of-America.php
On the night of January 7th, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, twenty-two, checked into a Motel 6 in Tucson, Arizona. He then dropped off a roll of film containing pictures of himself in a red g-string, ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Jared-Loughner-and-American-Violence.php
An optimistic theory of natural mind
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Brain-and-the-Meaning-of-Life.php
Georg Sorensen on the 'Liberal World Order'
Interview with fashion designer Gabrielle Tousignant
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Kollontai-fashion-collection.php
Bruce Cumings on his books "The Korean War: A History" and "Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power"
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Korean-war-and-American-policy-in-East-Asia.php
In the summer of 1943 Fred Rose, a candidate for the Labour Progressive Party, a communist party alias, was elected to the Canadian parliament in a by election in the federal constituency of Cart...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Soviet-Espionage-in-Canada-The-Fred-Rose-Affair.php
Russia's 2012 presidential election follows the controversial parliamentary poll in December last year which resulted in the declared victory of the ruling United Russia party, albeit with a redu...
Ever since Goldman Sach's coined the term BRICS to describe the rising economic power of Brazil, Russia, India and China, it has been clear that the twenty-first century will see a radical redist...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Canadian-pivot-to-China.php
Christopher Braider: "The Matter of Mind: Reason and Experience in the Age of Descartes" challenges the universal presumption that the decisive turning point in early modern Western literary and ...
Red Road is a movie which uses visuality to create the sensation of touch and most of the time leads the viewer to associate the visual material with sensations of the “haptic”...
Photography
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Photo-essay-street-photograpy-Mark-Lavorato.php
Every Lincoln scholar is familiar with the perhaps apocryphal story told by Henry Champion Deming, a member of the Connecticut Congress, about the president's understanding of Christianity...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Lincoln-and-the-Politics-of-Christian-Love.php
When Kim Jong Il died on December 17th, I was lucky to be in Singapore. That way I could watch from a salutary distance the froth and drivel that passed for expert American commentary: How can hi...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/North-Korea-totalitarian-succession-by-Bruce-Cumings.php
Steve Chan: If balance-of-power theory is correct, one should see China's neighbors and other major powers reacting to its rise in the manner predicted. They have not so far, thus presenting an e...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Looking-for-Balance-by-Steve-Chan.php
In 1696, Sir Isaac Newton left Cambridge for London, putting his scientific and alchemical pursuits temporarily on hold to assume the position of Warden of the Royal Mint. His main responsibility...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Casualities-of-credit-by-Carl-Wennerlind.php
Perhaps humanity is overly narcissistic, but few problems are so fascinating to us as our own, complex and intelligent minds. For over a century, debates have raged over so-called intelligence te...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-Intelligence-Happens-by-John-Duncan.php
Charles Darwin is rightly celebrated for providing, in The Origin of Species, the first workable scientific theory to explain the stunning diversity and complexity of life on earth...
‘The aim of philosophy,' the great American philosopher Wilfred Sellars once wrote, ‘is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possi...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Sources-of-Intentionality-by-Uriah-Kriegel.php
All over Argentina, his small shrines can be found along roadsides. They are often ramshackle, little more than a crate containing a statue. Sometimes they are painted red or festooned with red r...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Regional-Christ-the-Folk-Saint-Gaucho-Gil.php
Depuis que Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a été élu président de la République islamique d'Iran, en juin 2005, ses provocations fort peu diplomatiques ont défrayé la chronique internationale. Sa volo...
Excerpt from the Introduction to "10 Steps to Repair American Democracy: A More Perfect Union, 2012 Election Edition" by Steven Hill
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/10-Steps-to-Repair-American-Democracy-A-More-Perfect-Union.php
Are the French really so anti-American?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-and-French-relationship-history-and-politics.php
I'd always thought I'd be a writer some day...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Meaning-Of-Children-by-Beverly-Akerman.php
Richard Wolin on his book The Wind from the East
Neil Fligstein on the future of European political integration.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/EU-European-Identity-and-the-Future-of-Europe.php
Michael P. Winship on the sources of American republicanism.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Puritans-Pilgrims-and-creation-of-American-republicatism.php
David Levy's reportages from post-communist Russia
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Post-Soviet-Russia.php
David Levy's reportages from post-communist Russia
For an exhibition like Lyonel Feininger: From Manhattan to the Bauhaus, the greatest danger isn't incoherence, or sprawl, or over-ambition. It's that everything might cohere a little too methodi...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Lyonel-Feininger-at-Montreal-Museum-of-Fine-Arts.php
Matt Domino's Mad Men Reviews - Episode 4
As individuals, we make up our own abridged histories. When at a pub or a dinner party, we have a kind of condensed bio that we like to spout off when meeting new people, a single sentence we utt...
My book recounts the transformation of the German political economy after the end of the postwar growth period in the 1970s...
50 years after the Quiet Revolution. Photo Essays by Mark Lavorato
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Church-in-Montreal-Today.php
If you start in the city center of Nogales Santa Cruz and walk south for a while, at some point you see houses become much more run down, streets turn decrepit. You have crossed the Mexican borde...
Ideologies consistently had major effects on leaders' core international perceptions and policies. Most importantly, ideologies went a long way toward determining leaders' understandings of which...
The eyes of the world have rightly been focused since the beginning of 2011 on the popular upheavals in the Arab world. Leaders have been deposed in three Arab countries, very possibly in a fourt...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-International-Relations-of-the-Persian-Gulf.php
The world has seen globalization collapse once already. The gold standard era–with its free trade and free capital mobility–came to an abrupt end in 1914 and could not be resuscitated after W...
Where the Capitalist Dynamic has Brought Us...
When the “great recession” hit in September, 2008, it seemed that an era had ended. Since the 1980s, if not before, a pro-market consensus had governed economic policy-making and constrained ...
The three-decade old Chinese economic 'miracle' apparently has a dark side, one which seems to contradict current economic orthodoxy which posits that rising corruption depresses growth rates and...
The inspiration to write 'A Prophetic Peace' came from my experiences as a soldier in the Second Lebanon War fought between Israel and the Hezbollah in the summer of 2006...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Prophetic-Peace-Judaism-Religion-and-Politics.php
"I wrote a book for myself to read. One I would be sure to finish. Now what's left to be seen is whether others feel the same way."
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/You-comma-Idiot-book-by-Doug-Harris.php
Why Is Russia So Different?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Is-Russia-So-Different.php
During the first century of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), an imperial prince, Liu An (d. 122 B.C.E.), gathered together a group of scholars at his court in Huainan, in modern-day Anhui P...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Dao-of-the-Military-Liu-An-Art-of-War.php
It's been a splendid July day in Yellowstone. Cara and I have hiked through a blaze of wildflowers...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Yellowstone-Red-Summer.php
Badiou's new definition of love, which is at the heart of his new book 'In Praise of Love', sounds like something very old, although stated in a novel way...
David Levy on Jeff Prosserman's film 'Chasing Madoff'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Rise-and-Decline-of-a-Ponzi.php
One of my most enduring childhood memories is when my father brought home a battery-operated car dashboard panel designed to simulate the experience of driving...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/America-Love-Affair-with-Cars.php
An excerpt from 'This Mobius Strip of Ifs' by Mathias B. Freese
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Parable-of-the-Seawall-by-Mathias-B-Freese.php
Marcel Martel: It was not a pro PQ vote. We know that more or less 69 percent of the population voted for a party other than the Liberals. I can't name a single political commentator who was not ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Quebec-election-result-analysis.php
What is so important about morality, especially in economics? And why is a culture of honesty crucial to the well-being of society?
Brad S. Gregory on his book 'The Unintended Reformation'
Suggesting that natural science is unnatural and that religion, which traffics in the supernatural, is natural seems to turn things upside down. Sorting out these paradoxes, though, will offer in...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Religion-Is-Natural-and-Science-Is-Not.php
'Less Than Human' is a book about dehumanization. It is widely recognized that dehumanization plays an important role facilitating acts of violence in genocide, war, and other forms of atrocity. ...
Many Americans view Mexico as a nation of unrelenting bloodshed, where decapitated heads are rolled into nightclubs and mutilated corpses show up overnight on the roadside. Since 2006, when the g...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/US-Mexico-Cross-Border-Murder-and-Salvation.php
Today, the world faces another big economic challenge. The works and legacy of both Keynes and Hayek are explored once again, and once again we are not sure who of them gives us the right answer....
What does it take to get into the New Yorker and what are the odds?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-New-Yorker-Short-Story-of-Short-Story.php
In his book 'Proconsuls: Delegated Political-Military Leadership from Rome to America Today' Carnes Lord argues that the old Roman imperial institution of proconsulship is still useful for Americ...
Criticisms arguing that religion is irrational have been voiced in recent years by writers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. How is it possible, they ...
When Adam Smith promoted a market economy in the mid 18th century it was in the context of a moral theory that depended upon personal interaction. In those days the interests of small business en...
Matt Domino speaks with Josh Tillman (Father John Misty)
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Father-John-Misty-Josh-Tillman.php
'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' This famous cry of the early Christian Tertullian was answered in the nineteenth century with a resounding response of 'Everything!'...
Mark Pagel on the origins of the human social mind, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus on the creation of inequality, Melvyn L. Fein on human hierarchies, Michael Tomasello on cooperation, Samuel Bow...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Best-of-2012-Social-and-Science.php
Dear Reader, Once a year we ask for your support. We need your help to continue publishing and promoting some of the world's best authors and their ideas. Presently, the revenue we receive is ins...
The critics of capitalism are wrong. As long as people value freedom and growth, some form of capitalism will remain the principal way to organize economies. Political choice will force deviation...
In most societies, economic literacy encompassing the contending theories was neglected over recent decades in and by the one-sided curricula and particular theories prevalent in schools, media, ...
For many, China can rise peacefully only after it has changed from a communist dictatorship to a multiparty democracy, where officials are chosen in regular elections. However, without liberation...
Pre-mid-nineteenth-century relations in East Asia were decidedly not based on a system of equal, interacting nation-states who contracted treaties regulating their political and economic intercou...
It is reasonably assumed that all philosophers in Plato's 'Republic' are the same, and yet, arguably, they are not...
The United States government started out on a shoestring and almost immediately went bankrupt. To fight its war of Independence from Britain, it borrowed from banks in Holland and wheedled large ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Founders-and-Finance-by-Thomas-K-McCraw.php
The lessons learned from the British privatization. David Parker on his Official History of Privatization
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Official-History-of-Privatisation.php
Some subjects 'grow on you.' They keep recurring in the materials you read, and the stories you hear. Perhaps these subjects crop-up because you think about them. For me, fiduciary law is one of ...
GLENN Miller is probably the University of Colorado's most famous alumnus. Up on a wall in the Glenn Miller Ballroom, scene of square dances sexier than all the tangos of Argentina, hangs a huge ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Americans-Essay.php
My Uncle Shirley left our home in Alabama as a Jewish salesman, and turned up in rural South Carolina as a Baptist preacher. Of course, we didn't realize that last fact until we heard it at his f...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Visiting-Uncle-Shirley.php
Short Story by Matt Domino
That a photographer's guile can make for a heady and instructive aesthetic experience is proved by the remarkable work of Jakub Dolejs. His ongoing practice of deception now encompasses some of t...
People trying to understand the Great Recession often look back to the Great Depression. Nevertheless, because the economy of the 1930s was self-contained, its dynamics are unlike those of the co...
Malcolm Forbes on A.N.Wilson's book "The Elizabethans"
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sin-The-Early-History-of-an-Idea.php
David Levy speaks with Sakhr Al-Makhadhi
The love affair of Western society with technology has reinforced its tendency to optimism. We believe that unhappiness is a curable condition and the application of intelligence will solve every...
It all seemed incurably stained to begin with, though it began as an experiment made for moulding the human character. When looking at the record of the Olympics, a negative image emerges...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Olympics-the-politics-and-Baron-Pierre-de-Courbetin.php
In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) publicly defended the hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make t...
Many people, laypeople and scholars alike, assume that the kinds of dispositions that inevitably prevail in the process of biological evolution must be selfish and immoral, rendering humans and o...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Origins-of-Morality.php
In his Discourse on the 'Origins of Social Inequality,' Jean Jacques Rousseau identified private property, money and inheritance laws as the chief factors in the creation and maintenance of socia...
Courage, I suggest, is the willingness to risk life and limb for the sake of something. In other words, courage reveals what we care about...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Courage-The-Politics-of-Life-and-Limb.php
David Levy on the Rosenbergs and Walter Schneir's 'Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Murder-of-the-Rosenbergs.php
The German language has a word, 'Stammtisch,' that really has no English equivalent. The closest translation is something like 'a table reserved for regulars' or 'regular get-together.'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Oktoberfest-A-Stammtisch-Of-Thousands.php
Norman, my soon to be ex-husband, and I were sitting at opposite ends of the sofa like two prize fighters before a match...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Dividing-day-at-the-Grand-Hotel-du-Cap-Ferrat.php
'Imperialism' is an evocative word. It summons images of grim Roman legions marching through German forests, Maxim machine guns cutting down hordes of Dervishes at Omdurman, or scenes of torture ...
Short story by Cooper Sy
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Starbucks-in-the-University-Library-Short-story.php
Short story by Lee Matthew Goldberg
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Comprehending-Kings-Short-Story-Lee-Matthew-Goldberg.php
Short story by Robert Wexelblatt
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/how-hsi-wei-became-a-vagabond.php
A few years ago I flew back to Canada after many years in Europe. At Vancouver customs I noticed that the crowds were almost entirely Asian, and they all held out passports just like mine: dark b...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Privatising-Passports.php
When I watch horror today, I come to the films with a new set of experiences and from a different place than I did as a kid. When I watch Pet Sematary for the tenth time, it doesn't bother me tha...
There is no place in the world like Churchill Downs on Derby Day. Yes, of course, strictly speaking, there is no place in the world just like any other on any given day...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Kentucky-Derby.php
How did our ancestors convert the original level playing field to a stratified society?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Creation-of-Inequality.php
This year Russia experienced the return of the Kremlin veteran, Vladimir Putin, to the presidential seat. Although he is associated with political reaction and is concerned by the prospect of 'co...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Russia-Supports-North-Korea.php
There is a growing risk that China's economic growth could slow substantially in the medium term. This would not be the so-called hard landing, which implies a near term sharp slowdown followed...
In December 1999, hot with millennial fever and desperate to be somewhere 'important' when the clock turned on 2000, I traveled to Jerusalem. On Christmas Eve during that trip, I walked from Jeru...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Walls-by-Marcello-Di-Cintio.php
It is no doubt easier to imagine a world without Marx than a world without revolution, capitalism, communism and socialism. But in the world we actually inhabit, these still have to be seen throu...
An excerpt from Robert Wexelblatt's new book 'Losses'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Losses-by-Robert-Wexelblatt.php
The infinite ethical demand allows us to become the subjects of which we are capable by dividing us from ourselves, by forcing us to live in accordance with an asymmetrical and unfulfillable dema...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Faith-of-the-Faithless.php
The idea of ‘sin’ suits its times, argues Paula Fredriksen in her new book ‘Sin: The Early History of an Idea’.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sin-The-Early-History-of-an-Idea.php
Anthony Simon Laden on his book 'Reasoning: A Social Picture'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Reasoning-A-Social-Picture.php
The greatest breach in nature, philosopher William James wrote in 1890, 'is the breach from one mind to another...'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Animals-and-the-Human-Imagination.php
Review of Peter Swirski's 'American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History'
If human societies are to be modified in directions more people find fulfilling, this can only occur if the nature of human hierarchies is acknowledged and understood. This search is a worthy end...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Human-Hierarchies-A-General-Theory.php
It is one thing to strive to make a profit out of your skills and talents, something else entirely to indulge in profiteering or to assume that absolutely every area of your life must yield a fin...
An Interview With Grammy-Award winning singer-songwriter, Macy Gray.
Three poems from Michael Milburn's new book 'Carpe Something'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Michael-Milburn-Poetry.php
In August 1967, soon after the Six Day War, the Arab League met in Khartoum, three nos the response to Israel's offer to trade land for peace: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the-Zionist-entity-and-the-Occupation.php
The contemporary novel has many tools available to it in order to construct its work. Novels are meant to create their own plausible and realistic worlds wherein events take place and characters ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Novel-of-consciousness.php
With NASA's latest efforts on Mars with the Curiosity rover, humanity is now bracing itself for the hope of finding life past, present or future, on a distant plant. Much of this is drivel, sugge...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conquest-in-Space-Dreaming-about-Mars.php
Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Deconstruction
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Spectres-of-Marx-Derrida.php
Paradoxically, the promise of Kim Jong-Il might soon come true and North Korea may become a 'rich and prosperous state' – rich in natural resources and empowered by nuclear technologies.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rare-Earth-Metals-North-Korea-New-Trump-Card.php
Photo Essay
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Montreal-Church/index.php
Betty Shamieh: Being connected to two cultures, particularly two cultures that are sometimes at war, gives one insight into what is common about all human beings...
Interview with Keith Miller
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Keith-Miller-Pine-Hill.php
To consider a question such as what is poetry, is tantamount to asking what art is, or what is music...
In Stieglitz: A Beginning Light, Katherine Hoffman focused on the early years of Alfred Stieglitz's (1864–1946) career and his European roots...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alfred-Stieglitz-a-legacy-of-light.php
Short story by Andrew MacQuarrie
Poems by Simon Perchik
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Simon-Perchik-Poetry.php
Mid-July in Oslo is generally a very quiet time, as much of the city's population leaves in order to embark on the summer holiday season...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Norway-terror-attaks.php
The news stories that flooded front pages in the wake of Hurricane Irene late last month focused mostly on surging rivers, torn-up homes, downed trees, and the fate of New York City...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Covered-bridges-in-the-Quebec-countryside.php
Self-preservation is embodied in our brain's circuitry: we seek food when hungry, warmth when cold, and sex when lusty...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-neuroscience-tells-us-about-morality.php
Although I recognized the concept of intelligence from an early age, it wasn't until high school that I realized that being smart meant more than getting good grades, and that different people co...
The Arab Awakening – the chain of rebellions and revolutions that have rocked the Arab world since last December – has riveted the attention of people the world over...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-clash-of-ideas-in-world-politics-john-owen.php
Short story by Lee Matthew Goldberg (September, 2011)
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Our-buick-stopped-here.php
In the midst of a heated political discussion, you may still hear it said that ideas don't matter...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Age-of-fracture-Daniel-Rodgers.php
During the trying times that have followed the financial collapse of 2008, a long list of culprits has been blamed: homebuyers, mortgage lenders, bankers, Congress, and the Bush administration...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Blind-Spots-Bazerman-and-Tenbrunsel.php
We live in increasingly paternalistic societies; almost every day, somewhere in the developed world, a new law regulates what people can eat, drink, smoke, view, or read...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-welfare-state-and-the-rise-of-paternalism.php
A Review of Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Kantian-ethics-and-economics.php
Through most of human history the word “freedom” has been used to distinguish the members of a social and political elite from those classes of people – women, slaves, serfs, menial laborer...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-invention-of-market-freedom.php
There is a central teaching in certain schools of Mahayana Buddhist metaphysics that all phenomena are shunya , or empty of inherent existence...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Toward-a-Buddhist-politics-of-freedom.php
The dignity of the human person
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Neither-beast-nor-God.php
Poetry by Sharon Siegel
Prologues and epilogues, so often skimmed and scanned, demand closer inspection if the novel they frame purports or has proven to offer a longer, worthier shelf-life than its run-of-the-mill riva...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-blindness-of-the-heart-Julia-Franck-book-review.php
My father was an enigma to everyone, his three children not excepted. Perhaps even to himself...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Kantian-ethics-and-economics.php
One of the central projects of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been the attempt to reconcile our self-image as human beings with the picture of the world emerging from the natural sc...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Freedom-and-the-laws-of-nature.php
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber is one of the world's most famous studies in social science, competing for the first place with works such as Capital by Karl Marx a...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-protestant-ethic-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism.php
Travel and Habit in Merleau-Ponty and Proust
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Travel-and-habit-in-Merleau-Ponty-and-Proust.php
How did we get to the point where we miss the smells that a dog experiences but we see the rest of life in fine, colorful detail and depth?...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-fruit-the-tree-and-the-serpent-by-Lynne-Isbell.php
When my best friend Nigel and I were fourteen we started a band. Neither of us played a musical instrument. So my father took promo photos for us instead...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/We-Cant-All-Be-Gods.php
My brother Bobby and I looked up from the Nintendo. Our parents had given us the new game console for Christmas, and we had been glued to the television set ever since...
My book will soon be two years old. But I don't think it has dated. What has happened since it was published is more of the same: more depression, more federal deficit, more political stalemate, ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-crisis-of-capitalist-democracy-Richard-Posner.php
Why do we love fiction?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-the-origin-of-stories.php
Film and Philosophy: Taking Movies Seriously is a brief overview of the history of philosophizing about film, which begins with a survey of early film theorists that had a philosophical bent (lik...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Taking-movies-seriously.php
Yes you do. There's nothing left to believe in anymore. All is fiction. Somehow, we have to invent our own reality...
Even as he became a celebrity in the world of art, Willem de Kooning took pride in remaining an ordinary man, living (he liked to say) as he had when he was unknown and poor...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Between-sense-and-de-Kooning-by-Richard-Shiff.php
‘Poetry makes nothing happen,' said the poet W. H. Auden. How wrong he was...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-art-and-war-and-terror.php
Dialogues tells a story about how we got to where we are and hopes that the very telling of that story will help create a way for readers themselves to engage in reasonable dialogues about matter...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Dialogues-between-faith-and-reason.php
Anyone who has ever lived with a dog or a cat (or any other intelligent social animal) will attest to the occasional uncanny feeling that one's pet knows what one is thinking...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mindreading-animals.php
As the Metropolitan Museum's curator of Dutch and Flemish paintings for the past thirty-one years I know the collection's 230 Dutch pictures (those dating ca. 1600-1800) as well as I would if the...
I'm lonely but I dislike the company of other people and this puts me in a Hellbox...
The Politics of Inequality in Russia is a study of the political processes underlieing the steady rise in inequality observed in Russia since the end of the Soviet regime...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-politics-of-inequality-in-Russia.php
There was a man who beat his children. His name was Hans Holder...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Something-Tolstoyan.php
The Theological-Political Treatise was regarded by Spinoza's contemporaries as the most dangerous book ever published...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-book-forged-in-hell-Steven-Nadler.php
It was late autumn 1968. Trudging through the snow along Rue de la Montagne in Montreal as the day drew to a close, I met up with an old family friend...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-Mao-to-Market.php
Political extremism is one of the most pernicious, destructive, and nihilistic forms of human expression. During the twentieth century, in excess of 100 million people had their lives taken from ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Origins-of-political-extremism.php
Unbeknownst to many, the world is undergoing a monumental change with regard to the understanding and practice of the proper relationship between religion and politics...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Radical-democracy-and-political-theology.php
A few years ago, I published a book with this title, responding to a question posed by Gordon Brown...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Adam-Smith-radical-and-egalitarian.php
Prior to The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets, nobody has ever described how business, the practice of selling at a profit, first began...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Origins-of-Business-Money-and-Markets.php
It seems that fairness is an idea whose time has come. True, some cynics view fairness as nothing more than a mask for self-interest. But the cynics are wrong...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/fairness-and-the-social-contract.php
Many people, these days, hold the opinion that religion and science conflict; in some deep way they are opposed to each other...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Does-Science-Contradict-Religion.php
The title comes from Santayana, writing in Three Philosophical Poets of “a steady contemplation of all things in their order and worth. Such a contemplation is imaginative. No one can reach it ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Enlargement-of-Life.php
Scotland is a heavily-urbanised but post-industrial nation which voluntarily renounced its status as an independent nation-state to merge with its larger and more powerful southern neighbour Engl...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Scotland-goes-down-the-Quebec-road.php
An Essay on What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-literature-teaches-us-about-emotion.php
Books: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Was-America-Founded-as-a-Christian-Nation.php
Book excerpt
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alienated-and-Engaged-Muslims-in-the-West.php
Book Review
Essay by Mike Mercer
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Imagine-living-through-the-progress.php
Essay by the poet Michael Milburn
The Islamic Republic of Iran presents a wide range of challenges in a region that is already plagued by insecurity and conflict...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Iran-continuing-challenge-in-a-time-of-Arab-turmoil.php
Syria remains poorly understood, despite the pivotal role it plays in the contemporary Middle East...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Demystifying-Syria.php
In his book The Invention Of Peace Michael Howard quotes the nineteenth century English jurist, Sir Henry Maine. “It is not peace which was natural and primitive and old, but rather war. War ap...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Barbarous-Philosophers.php
Social scientists have been wary of applying Darwin's ideas. In our book "Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution" (published 2010 by the Universit...
On New Year's Day of 1802, the Baptist evangelist John Leland delivered a remarkable gift to the White House: a 1,235 block of cheese...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Evangelical-Christians-deists-and-America-founding.php
My book is a defense of human dignity. I mean that it is a defense of the equal status of individuals or persons vis-à-vis one another, and a defense of the superior stature of the human species...
The Roman Catholic Church, a principal world religion today in competition with other Christian faiths, had, by 1600, achieved dominance over huge swaths of Europe...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Economic-Origins-of-Roman-Christianity.php
Somewhere near the middle of "Why Jane Austen?", a book that combines literary and cultural criticism with recollections of teaching and travel and anecdotes about friends, neighbors, and strange...
When falling for short term gains to impede long-term retributions happen to be the way forward...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-inviolableking-of-Morocco.php
Many affairs of this life are fueled by money but one doesn't think about it unless the gas runs out...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sickness-and-health.php
The worldwide economic downturn is no short-term blip but a full-fledged crisis of capitalism. Amid the din of commentary and political posturing, it's appropriate to return to first principles f...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-current-crisis-and-the-essence-of-capitalism.php
It has become commonplace to attribute the rise of modern political thought in the West to a process of “secularization.” In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, so the story goes, political thou...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Hebrew-republic.php
Graham Greene was wrong about Vietnam. Not in the main, of course. The Quiet American (1955) still stands as not only the inaugural novel of the American intervention in Vietnam but also as a bri...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Graham-Greene-and-I-were-wrong.php
Richard Kearney's Anatheism: Returning to God after God investigates the possibility of a God after God (ana-theos)...
The writing life of the Canadian author Steven Mayoff.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-writing-life-Mayoff.php
Short story by James Robison
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Great-Lakes-Foundry.php
Short story by Lee Matthew Goldberg
Along an alleyway amid a shanty town in the old port district of Bombay where in the nineteenth century the great steamship company P and O built its vast dockyard stands a shrine to an African h...
After flying in a two-engine job from Pago Pago (that cheap t-shirt of a town) to Apia , capitol of Western Samoa, a local merchant showed me a series of postcards...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/14-degrees-southern-latitude.php
Perhaps the two most salient aspects of our humanity are our ability to communicate and our ability to design...
The idea that reading books can change your life has not been very fashionable this last century or so. It violates the high-modernist principle of art for art's sake, smacks of Victorian moraliz...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Jane-Austen-education.php
Relationships between sciences and religions are a thorny issue in our day...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Psychology-and-Catholicism.php
Defining conservatism is surprisingly hard...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conservatism-Kieron-OHara.php
Interview with Montreal's fashion designer Duy Nguyen
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Duy-Fashion-Designer-Interview.php
Ancient philosophy - especially after Aristotle - largely focused on how to achieve self-sufficiency on the one hand, and peace of mind on the other; it thus became fundamentally therapeutic, in ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Stoics-and-the-Epicureans-on-Friendship-Sex-and-Love.php
Until recently, the word "thrift" had largely disappeared from the active vocabulary of most Americans. Like chastity and temperance, thrift was well on its way to becoming a virtue relic of a by...
Alienation is a pervasive but puzzling feature of modern life. It is one of the few theoretical terms from Marxism that has entered into ordinary language...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Marx-and-Alienation-Essays-on-Hegelian-Themes-Sean-Sayers.php
States of War addresses one of the most pressing concerns of modern democratic states: how to reconcile the foundational drive to defend the nation with the principles of law and civic rights?..
Humans, it has been said since Aristotle, are rational animals. Those who scoff at the phrase misunderstand it as contrasting with irrationality. But the proper contrast is with the non- rational...
Philip Kitcher: "We became fully human when we were able to find ways of inhibiting tendencies to socially disruptive action, ways of reinforcing our altruistic capacities..."
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ethical-Project-by-Philip-Kitcher.php
Why should there be yet another book in the philosophy of religion, and why should I in particular write one? Rationality and Religious Commitment has grown from a great deal of my work on both t...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rationality-and-Religious-Commitment-by-Robert-Audi.php
The essay is perhaps the most accessible and democratic of all forms of writing. All it requires is a thesis and a discussion; the rest is up to the authors to present creatively their ideas and ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-essay-Toward-a-New-Narrative-Nonfiction.php
Imagine you are out and about, perhaps doing some shopping, or planning an evening at the movies with friends. Lots of people are around you, coming and going, all busy with their own plans. You ...
Russia's parliamentary elections conform to well-established patterns of arbitrary exclusion of opposition candidates and intimidation and manipulation of opposition forces. Given the exclusion, ...
In U.S. presidential politics the “threat” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran has emerged as a potent political issue comparable to Saddam Hussein's Iraq and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Iran-and-Republican-Presidential-Candidates.php
Ali Rahnema on his new book "Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics: From Majlesi to Ahmadinejad": "Majlesism as a religio-political ideology is based on two axial premises. First, that the...
The music came first, then the photographs. But what images they are: a sculptural Dexter Gordon bathed in cigarette smoke...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Blue-notes-in-black-and-white-by-Benjamin-Cawthra.php
Michelangelo Buonarroti is universally recognized to be among the greatest artists of all time...
André Gagné: "The Gospel of Thomas is not a “heretical” writing and should not be placed under the modern category of Gnosticism. Like the traditional New Testament writings, Thomas is also...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Gospel-of-Thomas-and-Christian-Origins.php
How do scientists decide they have discovered something? Gravity's Ghost is a detective story about a potential discovery called 'the Equinox Event'. At the same time, it's an investigation of th...
We may be quite aware of various ways we are constrained in life–biology, social norms, authority–but one area we are told embodies robust, unlimited choice is the free market...
When the Soviet Union broke up 20 years ago, its national airline Aeroflot suffered the same fate. From Baku to Bishkek, Tallinn to Tashkent, the governments of cash-strapped new republics seized...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Central-Asia-Frequent-Flyer-by-David-Mould.php
One hundred years ago Max Frisch was born in Zurich. He died twenty years ago in the same city. In between he got out and travelled widely, and in 1952 lived in the US and Mexico on a grant from ...
My friends and classmates: You may ask yourselves why I have gathered you here today. It has not been long since we last convened; indeed we met only yesterday on the sixteenth of November, a day...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-art-student-manifesto.php
My three brothers, eighteen, sixteen, and fourteen years my senior, lived away from home for most of my childhood. Our interaction was limited to their week-end visits to our parents' house, or t...
In 1991, I left graduate school to take a position teaching in the English department at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, a small agricultural town in the Bighorn Basin east of Yellowstone N...
Camp Nominingue is a residential wilderness camp in the Laurentians, four hours north of Montreal. Founded in 1925 by the Van Wagner family, and set on 400 acres on the shores of Lac Nominingue, ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/I-will-find-you-a-wheelbarrow.php
A rare, if not unique, pastoral voice in contemporary Iraqi Arabic poetry, Aisa Alyasiri (residing currently in Canada) was born in 1942 in a village near the city of Amarah in southern Iraq...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Herb-Selected-Poems-by-Aisa-Alyasiri.php
Poetry by Steven Mayoff
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Steven-Mayoff-Poetry.php
On he similarities between the rise of the American state and power and the upsurge of Roman Republic
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Is-America-the-New-Rome.php
There's an elderberry tree between my house and Edgar's house, in the wash filled with desert grass...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Phoebe-and-Edgar-in-the-garden-of-America.php
There was always a feeling of surprise, even after six months, at the diminutive size of the office...
TKazakhstan's capital Astana is renowned for its futuristic and eclectic (or ostentatious and jumbled, depending on one's aesthetic) architecture. It also has a more dubious distinction: it's the...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Winter-in-Kazakh-steppe.php
The wedding was over, so Nick and Stephen decided to stop at the ravine. Nick had heard about it while he was working on a house outside of Waterbury...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-swim-matt-domino.php
For centuries, the Russian traveler, crossing the border, felt an inexplicable lightness, as if an unseen burden had been lifted from his shoulders...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Character-of-Russia-by-David-Satter.php
Politics have returned to Russia, with a vengeance. The contested December 2011 parliamentary elections, which were supposed to be an inconsequential stepping stone on Vladimir Putin's triumphant...
Few of the modernisation tasks facing Vladimir Putin when he came to power in 2000 have been resolved. Indeed, many of the challenges facing the country after Stalin's death in 1953 still remain ...
"Truth in reviewing: Steve Cohen was my teacher in graduate school at Princeton and has remained a friend ever since. I don't think, however, that this is the reason I mostly agree with his versi...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Soviet-Fates-and-Lost-Alternatives-by-Stephen-Cohen.php
The ongoing process of revolutionary change in the Middle East and North Africa may not have spent all its potential force yet, but even this far, it has altered the world attitude to the region ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Arab-Spring-Islam-and-Democracy.php
I first saw Alaa Al Aswany's On the State of Egypt sitting in a bookstore in the U.S. in July 2011. The ‘revolution,' as we were still calling it—‘uprisings' is the more popular term now �...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alaa-Al-Aswany-On-the-State-of-Egypt
One way or another capitalism will continue on its crisis-prone way, the solution to one crisis begetting another. There is no final crisis and no final solution to crisis...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Capitalism-A-Very-Short-Introduction-by-James-Fulcher.php
Each of us will die. Sooner or later, each of you reading this words, as well as I who write them, will be dead. This fact about us affects our lives perhaps more profoundly than any other fact a...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Death-book-by-Todd-May.php
Since the 1970s, economics has entered a phase of aggression toward the other social sciences that is defined by its own creators as “economic imperialism..."
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-poverty-of-Clio-Boldizzoni.php
When we try to explain acts of human cruelty, there is no scientific value in the term 'evil' but there is scientific value in using the term 'empathy erosion'...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-science-of-evil-by-Simon-Baron-Cohen.php
“When I'm lost in my art – I'm at home,” says Ruben Anton Komangapik, contemporary Inuit artist...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Inuit-art-of-Ruben-Komangapik.php
Robin Tung interview with the media artist and designer Noa Kaplan
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Art-and-process-with-Noa-Kaplan.php
Even people with little interest in high fashion know the name Chanel—a name synonymous with sophistication and glamour...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Coco-Chanel-by-Linda-Simon.php
'Art for art's sake' is a much misunderstood phrase. In the public imagination it is invariably the oriflamme of Decadents and Aesthetes...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-art-for-arts-sake.php
A Review on Susan Buck Morss' “The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project”
For as long as humans have fought wars, there have been those willing to kill, and to risk their lives, for profit...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Contracting-peacekeeping-operations-to-the-private-sector.php
The Last Utopia assesses how deeply rooted in history the notion of “international human rights” is...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-last-utopia-by-Samuel-Moyn.php
Gabriel Hunt filched one of the stuffed grape leaves his wife, Caroline, had made for the dinner-dance tonight...
Humanity's single greatest achievement is, perhaps, to understand something about the way that the world really works...
Although revolutionary forces succeeded in capturing the main urban centers of Libya and killing Muammar Gaddafi, the ultimate outcome of the civil war is far from certain. Is conflict really at ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Libya-the-future-of-a-revolution.php
Death has long been seen as the ultimate equalizer, yet its depiction in the news takes shape across unequal parameters...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/About-to-die-book-review-by-Barbie-Zelizer.php
Poetry by William Lychack
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/William-Lychack-Poetry.php
Bashar al-Asad is not going to sign his own death warrant. A scenario of reconciliation South African style does not seem to be possible...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-struggle-for-power-in-Syria-Nikolaos-van-Dam.php
While we all have a deep and abiding desire to be treated well and to be recognized as worthy, our lack of awareness and understanding of the many ways we routinely violate each other's dignity i...
Any creation story is a story about models, for as King Lear reminds us, “Nothing can come of nothing..."
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-real-real-thing-Wendy-Steiner.php
After Jodie Johnston left Nevada with Johnny on his bus, she called from hotels the mornings after shows, excited and eager to report...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-stranger-in-the-snow.php
Tunisians made history on October 23rd this year by taking part in the regions first free and fair elections that were held in the backdrop of the Arab Spring...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tunisia-success-heralds-a-testing-time-for-Egypt.php
I have never seen a painting as tender and vibrant as Gustav Klimt's oil on canvas painting, “The Kiss.” To me, “The Kiss,” circa 1907-08, enacts a perfect transaction between two people ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Gustav-Klimt-the-kiss.php
To tell the truth. To remain within nodding distance of the facts, which run away from you effortlessly. To drive after them living people, who are much more unwilling and in the end disappointin...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Guelph-in-the-afternoon.php
Cooperation was prominent among the suite of behaviors that marked the emergence of behaviorally modern humans in Africa...
The central contention of the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens is that there has for several centuries been a war between science and rel...
Ceasing to be human is a fugitive event; it can't be captured by a single narrative or conceptual context. Perhaps the proper way to pursue the matter is by way of historical inquiries into the f...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-ceasing-to-be-human.php
As a philosopher I ask different questions about portraits than art historians...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Portraits-and-persons-by-Cynthia-Freeland.php
I began researching Starring New York before I finished my prior book, Cowboys as Cold Warriors. In that book I considered a group of film westerns in their relationships to U. S. Cold War cultur...
The summer of 2011 marked 20 years since Dance Smartly, a magnificent Canadian 3-yr-old filly, cake-walked down the home stretch of Woodbine racetrack in Toronto...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-monopoly-took-over-a-sport.php
Short story by B. Newmark
My mother had her favorites: dark chocolate, lightly salted cashews, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Diamond, silver jewelry, Shalimar perfume, black coffee, red wine, the Chicago Cubs...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-first-heartbreak.php
To many people hearing the phrase Middle East politics, and in particular Iraqi politics, conjures up images of sectarian strife, tribal and clan loyalties, and persecution of ethnic minorities.....
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Red-Star-Over-Iraq-by-Johan-Franzen.php
Poetry by L.N.Nixon
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Poetry-Lauren-Nicole-Nixon.php
On a hot summer day in 1967, the blind and infirm Jorge Luis Borges challenged his healthier and much younger protégé, Italo Calvino...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Borges-and-Calvino-Race-for-Blood-Sausage.php
I was 16 in 1994. I remember I had a crush on a girl at my high school named Stacy...
First let me tell you what I'm not referring to. I'm not referring to that section of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey where poets, playwrights and writers from Chaucer to Hughes are burie...
The viability of western democracy is now being put to a severe test: can the economic crisis be tackled in a way that recognizes the situation of the great majority of the population, or must th...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Strange-Non-Death-of-Neoliberalism-by-Colin-Crouch.php
Is it possible to prevent or forestall poverty?
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/One-Illness-Away-by-Anirudh-Krishna.php
Book review
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Institutional-Revolution.php
The Museum of Fine Arts Houston's exhibition 'WAR PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath' includes a photo of a dead man's lower limbs, stocking feet in loafers, the shot chopped...
Poetry in prose by Sarah A. Odishoo
For most of human history our conceit has ordained that animals exist for us, to do with them as we please. We employ them for sport, entertainment, experiments, and work; their lives are crushed...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/What_do_we_owe_animals.php
On October 2, 2018, Saudi journalist and government gadfly Jamal Khashoggi entered his country’s consulate in Istanbul to obtain some paperwork to finalize a divorce and never emerged—alive.�...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Chess-vs-Checkers-and-Other-Diplomatic-Dances.php
man became man, not because he invented the wheel, — important as it may have been. Not because he is the Homo Sapiens, or because he discovered the logic of Aristotle. But, he became man when ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Alexander-Schmemann-Between-Utopia-and-Escape.php
Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face. To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be it never so fine, is not long in arousing disg...
Of the French Symbolist School of poetry, Nicolas Berdyaev writes in his Crisis of Art (1917) that its contributors not only acutely sensed the profound spiritual crisis that had shaken and sha...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Meditations_Divagations_on_Two_Sonnets.php
There are two pathways to utopia, and by extension to eutopia—a better rather than a perfect place. The first one is commonplace, having been pursued in every society since the dawn of society,...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-Utopia-Redux.php
Ukraine is being held hostage by a war that is not really a war—but this depends on one’s point of view. For the separatist forces in the east it is a rebel conflict. Media pundits call it ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Letter-From-Ukraine.php
By 1995, the liveliest bar in Saigon was 'Apocalypse Now.' With admirable economy, the bar’s owners managed a gentle dig at America’s infamous military defeat by giving a nod to its ongoing c...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Vietnam-A-Half-Remembered-Tragedy.php
Marx was in some sense right, and Trump is in the same sense right. Why else do we love fantasy movies about 007 and SEALs and people who can change the world through muscle and a bullet, right h...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Some-Expertise-Deserves-to-Die-Some-Does-not.php
Amid Rage is based on scenarios both real and imagined. There have been incidents where DEP lawyers and their families and inspectors have been terrorized by people associated with the industries...
Let me present to you the ultimate life coaching team: Marie Kondo and Socrates. Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing consultant devoted to uncluttering our households. Socrates, the ancient Gree...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tidying-up-with-Socrates.php
For Dostoevsky, Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803-1873) was equal to Pushkin as a 'poet-philosopher.' And Tolstoy once said that 'no one should live without Tyutchev.' The Slavophil Alexei Khomiako...
Over the span of several days, with amazing an ease and lack of harm there has occurred greatest an event in Russian history and one of the greatest events in world history. Truly, in how this Ru...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Downfall-Of-The-Sacred-Russian-Realm.php
The catastrophe, termed the Russian Revolution, through all the degradations, tribulations and disappointments, has to lead to a new and better awareness. Such an experience in the life of a peop...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ruin-Of-Russian-Illusions.php
By the time I launched into psychoanalytic training, with all its reading requirements, control cases, hours of close supervision and my own analysis, I had finally been able to absorb myself not...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Elizabeth-Bishop-Charles-Darwin-And-Building-Watts-Towers.php
There is no correct academic view of men in the contemporary world, and hence no theoretical vocabulary for considering them that seems anything other than wrong to most men, who deal with this f...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Academia-Doesnt-Have-a-Clue-About-Men.php
The mediocrity of Edward Gibbon’s Oxford professors caused the great historian to call them 'academical bigots,' and to say that the fourteen months he spent at Magdalen College were 'the most ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the_handmaiden_of_leviathan.php
Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face. To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be it never so fine, is not long in arousing disg...
Words allow us to navigate our way through life, but map is not territory. The ground we walk on is very different from our verbal accounts of it. It would be foolish to imagine there’s a one-t...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-the-Stomach-of-a-Termite.php
Must one be civil to evil? Shake the devil’s old horny hand? Shouldn’t we fight good’s upheaval? Can’t we finally take a stand?...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Courtesy-Cathleen-Calbert-Poetry.php
In our particular time and place—Earth in the 21st century-it makes sense to consume as little meat, seafood, and dairy as each of us can manage. I’m not suggesting veganism is desirable or a...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Spider-Shows-the-Way-Towards-Greater-Compassion-for-Animals.php
One June night this summer, I encountered a wolf spider on the floor near my bed. This tiny animal had somehow wandered indoors; a rescue was clearly in order. That rescue turned out to be a frau...
Many Christians, and almost all adamant atheists, see creation science as a backdoor to sneaking God into school curricula, and public life generally. Among most educated people, creation science...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Creation-Science-Makes-Sense-But-Fred-Alford.php
Shortly after birth, a baby has experienced life’s most basic joys: eating, embracing, moving, playing, and sleeping. Eating offers us the most intense possible integration with our world: we c...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Toward-a-Joyful-Philosophy.php
Even before his narrative begins, Albert Camus offers a cue on how to read The Plague. He positions a statement by Daniel Defoe as the epigraph to the entire work. Any novelist writing about epid...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Reading-Shilts-Reading-Camus-Reading-a-Plague.php
President Obama had made it clear in advance that he would not apologize, when he became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, in May 2016. His position followed that of eleven prior...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Nuclear-Counterintuition-Risk-Reduction-During-the-Cold-War.php
Considered broadly, what kind of institution has the CCP become under Xi, and is it appropriate to a globally involved superpower? What Xi has systematically done is to turn the Party into a robo...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Chinese-Communist-Party-Anniversary.php
In The Thin Red Line, his 1962 novel about WWII, James Jones, himself a wounded veteran of Guadalcanal, has his grizzled protagonist, Sergeant Welsh, mutter: 'What is it all about?... What remain...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Invisible-Enemy-James-Jones-and-the-Politics-of-Grief.php
PRIMO LEVI COULD be deceptively modest. Despite the fact that he published some twenty books, in just about every literary genre, he sometimes cultivated the image of a nonliterary author, a scri...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Primo-Levi-Cosmos.php
While conscription has gone out of fashion in some parts of the world and wars haven’t been waged on quite the same scale, atomic missiles now point in all directions and massive armies continu...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Our-Western-World-Nothing-New.php
Ein bild hielt uns gefangen. Followers of Charles Taylor will recognise Wittgenstein’s dictum as a leitmotif running through his recent work. ‘A picture holds us captive.’ Analytic philosop...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Charles-Taylor-The-Language-Anima.php
On a beach on the Adriatic coast of Italy in 1970, I was about to wade into the sea when I stopped to answer a question about the language of my dreams. Two young employees of the hotel where I w...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Pulling-the-plug-on-dream-interpretation.php
Does Tolstoy, in his late years, load the dice for the sake of teaching a moral lesson? Does he leave room for any ambivalence, for any genuine irony? Edward Wasiolek reported years ago that his ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Tolstoy-Caius-Is-Mortal-On-the-Death-of-Ivan-Ilych.php
I was led to Whitaker when writing the biography of the artist Clay Spohn, who spoke highly of an artist under whom he had studied—Xavier Martinez. I found an article about Martinez which inclu...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Herman-James-Whitaker-Storyteller-of-North-and-South.php
When I sat down in early 2016 to begin writing a book about the history of vaccines, I realized that anti-vaccine movements always seemed to accompany each new scientific breakthrough. Indeed, an...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Our-Longstanding-Love-Hate-Relationship-with-Vaccines.php
Around the middle of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr was the most prominent Protestant theologian in America. He was on the cover of Time magazine (March 8, 1948). More recently, Barack O...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Reinhold-Niebuhr-and-the-Scandal-of-the-Twentieth-Century.php
Do police racially profile working class Asian Americans? Of course they do. Does Jeb Bush feel it’s better to claim that when he said 'anchor babies' he really meant Asian immigrants rather th...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-Ta-Nehisi-Coates-Between-The-World-And-Me.php
Hidden deep in the unwritten past lies the origin of our love for a good story. Long before the invention of such technological marvels as clay tablets or parchment, nameless storytellers, relyin...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-are-novels-good-for.php
it happens she leans into the window as if to feel her own absence. she leans in with obstinate slowness, topples, and behold the pane shatters yes shatters...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rooms-Second-Antechamber.php
Shortly before assuming the presidency in 1913, Woodrow Wilson told a friend that 'it would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.' This now famous exc...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Woodrow-Wilson-Religion-And-The-New-World-Order.php
Eighty years ago, Neville Chamberlain became British prime minister. He is best known for the appeasement policy he pursued towards Nazi Germany. Had he resigned or died before he assumed the pos...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/neville-chamberlain.php
Gender theory is a hot subject academically these days. In terms of methodology, it is positioned somewhere between humanities and social sciences, because it has found a point of view that makes...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Sex-and-Gender-Reconsidered.php
Poetry and still photography appear to be incompatible aesthetic media. Both expect the viewer or reader to enact them by participation, but in different ways. Poetry is temporal, with a clearly ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/John-Ashbery-and-Robert-Frank.php
The Genesee, my first river, was shallow but strong willed at Kishketuck, not many miles above a series of plunges into Letchworth gorge. Once Charlie had to shout awake a placid boatload riding ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Accidental-Gravity.php
Remi, my father, would complain about how his children were not servile. Eva, his wife, said he was jealous of each one of them. School promoted good feelings toward parents. We children adopted ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Four-Roads-Hotel.php
Professor Tuck’s book should be of immense interest not only to his fellow political theorists, but also to the rest of us who find ourselves, with whatever degree of formal academic training o...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Sleeping-Sovereign-the-invention-of-modern-democracy.php
For Ray L. Hart, God is first of all a word, 'a word in the English language'. Because God is a word without an obvious referent, it poses a question to anyone who thinks about the concept that i...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/God-Being-Nothing-Toward-A-Theogony.php
'The Tragedy of U.S. Diplomacy' resides in the fact that the concept of the nation state is incompatible with the only pillar of Christianity that the American Civil Religion has retained – its...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Tragedy-Of-U-S-Foreign-Policy.php
A hundred years ago, Europeans controlled four-fifths of the world’s land surface outside Antarctica. Philip Hoffman, a prominent economic historian at the California Institute of Technology, a...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Did-Europe-Conquer-the-World.php
Some readers may be unaware that President Dwight Eisenhower told incoming President John F. Kennedy in 1961 that Laos was the most important foreign policy issue facing the United States. This h...
It seems an obvious and fair question to ask: Why, after fifty years of occupation and control, hasn’t Israel managed to come up with a solution to the impasse it is in with regard to the Pales...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Two-State-Impossibility-The-One-State-Opportunity.php
W. H. Auden once remarked that he sometimes avoided unwanted questions about being a poet by telling people instead that he was a medieval historian. He did so because “it freezes conversation....
I was supposed to be writing about a refugee in Istanbul. Then she disappeared. Most of them do disappear now and then. Shortly thereafter, I had to disappear. Therefore, I am now the subject mat...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Fragments-from-the-life%20of-the-spectacular-victim.php
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, my friend Renata emailed from Hungary. 'I don't know what to say. We are shocked by the result...What happened to America? Is there any hope to wait for a...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/It-Is-Not-Too-Late-to-Learn-from-Hungary-Past.php
We are most complete, most alive, when we live for another, and when we tell each other stories about our lives lived together...
Cotton Mather began the final book of his Magnalia Christi Americana, published in 1702, by telling the story of a windmill in the Netherlands that turned so wildly during a violent storm its gri...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Postapocalyptic-Dissent.php
Justice is neither fixed nor transcendent, but a source of will emanating from each and every human interchange. Because justice is alive, it continues to evolve in ways that cannot be predicted....
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Liberal-Theory-Of-Human-Nature.php
When one proposes, as I do here, to speak of Europe and culture, one must first say what one means by Europe...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-makes-the-West-unique-Remi-Brague.php
Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for exist...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mutual-Aid-A-Factor-of-Evolution.php
Short Story: THERE once lived in a village a peasant named Iván Stcherbakóf. He was comfortably off, in the prime of life, the best worker in the village, and had three sons all able to work. T...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Spark-Neglected-Burns-The-House.php
The most powerful ideas, those whose influence radiates beyond the covers of books, inspire both fear and hope. Martin Luther’s claim that every man is a priest did so as did Marx’s conceptio...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Malthus-Dismal-Theorem.php
One of the greatest current political flash points globally across different countries, governments, political systems and parties, academics, media, and minority groups is concern and debate ab...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Who-Defines-Social-Justice.php
We need to say collectively and loudly that masculinity is real, that being a man is something that is achieved, and that expressing masculinity in actions is or should be the primary goal of mal...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Men-Are-not-Women-Waiting-to-Be-Fixed.php
A rock garden would appear to present a paradox. How can rocks, however artfully arranged, constitute a garden? Rocks are not living things, but living things make up a garden, do they not? Th...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Rock-Garden-Of-the-Ryoanji-Temple.php
Jordan Peterson, educated at McGill in Montreal and teaching in Toronto, is the new North American 'it' boy—and maybe beyond. Or rather, the point is precisely that he’s not a boy but a man. ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Jordan-Peterson-Is-So-Necessary-Nowadays.php
At our last meeting, you and I had a long discussion about the nature of European culture and the characteristics that distinguish it from the culture that belonged to Russia in ancient times, tr...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/European-Culture-Russian-Slavophile-Culture.php
'What is life'? Ana kept asking herself this one morning, while sipping her Darjeeling tea. That winter day her thoughts kept bringing her into a world where questions were only asked but not ans...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The_Rotating_Billboard_by_Cristina_Plamadeala.php
The 'free society' seems to be a phrase of American coinage. At least it has no comparable currency in any other language, ancient or modem. The same is true of the phrase 'free government.' This...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/John-Courtney-Murray-American-Pluralism.php
That Nicholas Roerich, a celebrated Russian artist, was an émigré and that he had lived in New York came to me as a surprise when I discovered a limestone-trimmed row house in a leafy side stre...
The great expectation about Turkey becoming a model 'Muslim democracy' has entirely failed. All major Turkish groups, the AKP, the Gülen movement, and the Kemalists have shared responsibility in...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Islam-And-Democracy-In-Turkey.php
The gates at Bornholmer Bridge were opened and crowds poured through, as the overwhelmed East Berlin border guards looked on. Like millions of Americans, I watched the story unfold on NBC Nightl...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Cold-War-A-Deconstruction.php
Liberals, the kind of people who write for many newspapers and who staff most colleges and universities in North America and Western Europe, are still trying to figure out why political candidate...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Conservatives-Are-Resurgent-Worldwide.php
From Paris to Toronto, Beijing to Washington, people are asking the same question: how does President Trump make decisions? This question is intriguing because Trump often deviates from the norm,...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Many-Faces-Of-President-Donald-Trump.php
The Bansurs—parents, older daughter, younger son—were delivered to their new house on a Wednesday. Most of us were at work or in school but a report made the rounds. The family arrived in a...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Amputated-Hand.php
Camus insists that he is an absurdist, not an existentialist. OK, but it is important to figure out what he means. Camus thinks a Christian can be an absurdist. I don't. I do think that absurdism...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Camus-Absurdism-Lacks-Imagination.php
Victor Brombert on Primo Levi, suicide, and survival.
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Primo-Levi-The-Flawed-Design.php
In 1969 I hosted a TV show, THE NEW WOMAN, out of Philadelphia, Pa. WTAF-TV channel 29. I didn’t know then, on the cusp of the feminist movement that I, like goddess Isis, and womankind, would ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Musings-on-the-feminist-movement-by-a-past-penis-envy-er.php
No one would ever write in a clinical chart note, 'This patient is losing their mind. However, soundness of mind is a fundamental clinical, as well as a legal and financial, and perhaps cultural ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Is_Western_Culture_Losing_Its_Mind.php
There's a question nowadays among readers and writers of satire: does satire require, however implicitly, to reference a moral standard? For me as a satirist, that's what Catholicism does: it sup...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Lee_Oser_An_Interview.php
The struggle to speak true words requires perpetual irony, self-criticism, dialogue, and openness. I can aim for a good, unobstructed view of things without deluding myself that I am standing on ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/What_Does_Truth_Mean.php
The apocalyptic scenes of privation and devastation in Gaza are medieval in their horror. Whether by accident or (more likely) foresight and design, Hamas has wrecked the lives of the people by w...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Judging_Jerusalem_South_Africa_vs_Israel.php
One might well ask why Canadians would be interested in a memoir by a Harvard professor describing his personal and intellectual journey first as a student at Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard and t...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Godfather_of_Soft_Power.php
For a more truly diverse and integrated human state to come about, rooted in basic motivations and fired by the challenge of ever new horizons, we need lives that are simpler and yet richer – a...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Crucial_Need_for_a_Less_Mechanized_Life.php
In bocca al lupo!‘Into the Wolf’s mouth’, as Italian idiom would have it, glib and edgy, street-modern to the hilt, belies its closet status as a literary fossil. Folklore traces its beginn...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Mystery_of_The_Sabine_Wolf.php
These two thirteenth century ink paintings by Muqi would teach us to acknowledge and to appreciate the little things in life. And they also teach us to acknowledge and to appreciate our own life ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Two_Zen_Ink_Paintings_of_the_Thirteenth_Century.php
Only the hands remain, open palms in prayer, ghost hands visible on Corinthian pillars....
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/The_Inexplicable_Hands_of_Ravenna_Poems.php
My writing is born from my reading...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/An-Interview-with-Jean-Luc-Beauchard.php
Inherent to memoir and especially autobiographical prose is reverse perspective. Distant events come to the fore, imposingly, in all their more and less salient details, but as the story approach...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Nina_Berberova_and_Robert_Oppenheimer.php
Let’s start in the final room, at the end of the painter’s life, when he is eighty years old. Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House (about 1664) is a wonderful loan from the Frans Hals Museum...
When surveying the astral realms, John Dee, the great angelologist and chief astrologer to the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England, made use of a perfectly circular disk of jet-black obsidian, ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Age_of_Enoch_and_Metatron.php
It is a curiosity of the human social DNA that we like to clump together in groups, be they ethnic, religious, ideological, or territorial. This thought came to me as I listened both to survivors...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Unusual_Thoughts_Prompted_by_the_Hamas-Israel_War.php
Among the half dozen photographs featured in the gallery of the David Wagoner special issue that appeared 42 years ago for the now defunct Slackwater Review out of Lewiston, Idaho, you will find ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/David_Wagoner_Poems_of_Performance.php
'Allahu akbar!' The repeated Arabic call to prayer that issues from the nearby mosque (‘cami’ in Turkish, ‘masjid’ in Arabic) is the first sound that I hear very early each pre-dawn morni...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Letter_from_Istanbul.php
Under its content banner 'Psychology and Relationships', CNBC offered a first-person account posted on Wednesday 13 September 2023 from a woman who attended a Beyoncé event held in Las Vegas ear...
I should have picked the bench. I mean, the fellow in the maroon uniform gave me the option once I was unceremoniously pulled inside the vehicle. 'Bench or Bar,' he offered matter of factly and I...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Fiction/Resistance_2_0.php
I confess, I scattered a small, hopeful handful of seeds for the newly fledged...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Three_Poems_Ron_McFarland.php
Science, philosophy, and culture – are these separate magisteria, or can there be beneficial cross-fertilization? This question may be considered almost as old as civilization itself...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/On_Life_and_Its_Evolution.php
Extreme inequality is the sometimes mentioned but not well seen elephant in the room. Mostly noted and then ignored, it continues its 45-year explosion, especially in the US and UK without pause ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/To_Deal_with_Inequality_It_Must_Be_Better_Understood.php
What we cannot speak about we must indicate with sighs, shouts, grunts, tears, and shrieks...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Four_Poems_from_Ovid_Creek_Sam_Magavern.php
It was not as a student of philosophy that I learned about Edith Stein. The luminous books she wrote as a phenomenologist and a Christian metaphysician did not figure in any of my academic course...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Edith_Stein_and_the_State.php
Homer’s gods can roar with laughter. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and the rest of the cabal — grinning, giggling, splitting their sides. Anything man can do, the gods can do better. The Greek pantheo...
Many books have been, are, and will be written on the subject of international relations. But not many, at least not today, would discuss international order and our perceptions of it from a poli...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Political_Theology_of_International_Order.php
Nina Berberova was unhappy whenever her Italics Are Mine was called a memoir. She would insist that her book was an autobiography—and not merely insist but do everything in her power to cement ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Nina_Berberova_and_Simone_de_Beauvoir.php
Better known for her books on low-wage workers, such as Nickled and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her dissertation on cellular immunology, and had always considered herself a scientist, even as...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Wild_Gods_of_Barbara_Ehrenreich_and_William_James.php
Anyone who’s followed the news for decades has noticed without fail that coverage has tilted more and more towards stories about celebrities and all manner of trivial conflicts between members ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Veils_of_Distortion.php
'In dreams,' said Delmore Schwartz, 'begin responsibilities. This is nowhere truer than in the case of René Descartes (1596-1650), whose dreams committed him without reserve to the life of the m...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Descartes_Dreams.php
I am called back to the too little acknowledged problem of adult/minor sex in the works of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez...
She spoke as to a child who could not understand. All the futility that lay ahead. Yet who she knew would go on to repeat. Repeat repeat the things men had to learn....
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/They_Shall_Reap_the_Whirlwind.php
I’ll never forget that day in 1944 - it was extremely warm for November – people called it 'Indian Summer' – but I didn’t see any Indians. It was the day I saw Joel Kupperman at school. H...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/What_Ever_Happened_to_Joel_Kupperman.php
What happens after we die has always been a major source of religious speculation, and providing answers to this question has also been one of religion’s chief tasks. Many faiths use the fear o...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Reflections_on_Death_and_the_After_Death.php
This book is a study of ambitious young Chinese, their aspirations, and career choices. It was prompted by an initial puzzle: how does the Chinese party-state manage to attract recruits and maint...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Rejuvenating_Communism.php
Is Jesus Christ best understood as a prophet of the apocalypse? Yes, argued Albert Schweitzer in 1906 in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Moderns, said Schweitzer, tend to miss this reality, tu...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_quest_for_the_historical_Jesus.php
Philosophy usually does without cases, dealing only with principles, ideas, laws, and universals. However, as modern science is inclined to believe, it is chance that lies at the foundation of th...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Philosophical_Cases.php
After World War II, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, and others debated the problem of evil in the context of Holocaust Theology. When visiting Auschwitz where Wiesel had been imprisoned by...
Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily overlooked as a subject of inquiry in social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Obedience_to_Authority.php
Every epoch has a predisposition for a certain type of disease that becomes its symbol. Illness is not only a physiological phenomenon, but also a moral and historical one. In the postrevolutiona...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Pandemic-A-Philosophical-Diagnosis.php
'I think paintings are like poems. We take words that have a certain meaning but when you put them together - it’s a new meaning altogether. Painting is like that for me: it is that meeting of ...
A pillar of our thinking today about 'The Good Citizen' and the place of social ethics in the public arena is the often hidden contribution made by religious thinkers, critics and advocates of li...
The wish to know the future is as old as humanity. In all cultures around the globe our ancestors have consulted signs from the heavens and from nature, believing they could see or hear and inter...
'Love is love' declares the sign on my neighbor's lawn. It is a generous sentiment, reminding us that love is valued no matter who loves whom, and regardless of how and why they love. Yet it cont...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Many-Memes-of-Love.php
Reviewing Bible-based self-help books gets old quickly, but Rick Warren's 'The Purpose Driven Life,' is so influential it's worth reading, if only to figure out why it's so popular. It's not new,...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/On-The-Best-Selling-Bible-Self-Help-Book-Ever.php
Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined to us; the feverish waiting for ...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-End-of-Love-Illouz.php
Writing (as writers know) is sometimes born of rage, and other times out of love or grief. Free as a Jew contains a mix of all three, but this time in relation not to an individual but to the Jew...
Poetry and Photography
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Three-Poems-Paul-Rabinowitz.php
In 'After Lockdown,' the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour takes a radical stance: with the current pandemic, we experience a dress-rehearsal for what climate change has in store...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Learning-From-Lockdown.php
We launched our raft onto the serene Klamath River on the Oregon side. We had parked Willy’s car at the takeout on the California side of the river, then taken the hour-plus-long shuttle ride b...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Green-Treasure-Box.php
Humanism is one of the great movements and also one of the great controversies in modern intellectual history. Let me begin with a broad definition: Humanism is the defense and promotion of human...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/The-True-Meaning-of-Humanism.php
According to the so-called law of three stages (loi des trois états) established by Auguste Comte, humanity progresses in its development from the theological to the metaphysical understanding o...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Basic-Problems-of-the-Theory-of-Progress.php
As Homer recalls, wily Odysseus escapes from the cave of the Cyclops by poking out the monster’s solitary eye. The wounded Cyclops roars to the fleeing Greek: 'Who are you? Who can I say did th...
Three poems by Royal W.F. Rhodes
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Three-Poems-Royal-Rhodes.php
It is easier to imagine apes as eco-engineers on a grand scale when we figuratively see them as forest persons and not as 'animals' or instinct-driven machines. I use the word person, therefore, ...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Ape-Ethic-and-the-Question-of-Personhood.php
For some decades the Wyndham Lewis Society has issued annuals of essays on Lewis’s philosophical and political views. A slew of books interpret his writings. Several biographies add to his two ...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Wyndham-Lewis-The-Intellectual-As-Artist.php
Our philosophies of life pervade all we do. The problem is not this or that approach but the day-to-day structure in which each approach is presented and considered. The current structure allows ...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/Philosophia_Ars_Vitae.php
When Ezra Pound moved to London in 1908, the person he most wanted to meet was W.B. Yeats, and he quickly befriended the great poet. During the daytime he taught Yeats how to fence; in the evenin...
https://themontrealreview.com/2009/What-Thou-Lovest-Well-Remains.php
It may come as a surprise to some, but trauma theory has become a leading analytic framework through which to analyze literary texts. Of course, literary theorists can and should use any framewor...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Literary_Theory_Is_Not_Trauma_Theory.php
We moved mostly during the day. They moved at night. So we set our ambushes at night, and they during the day.
Populist politics blends together four specific emotions – fear, disgust, resentment, and love. The mixture of these emotions forms the matrix of populism because they generate antagonism betwe...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Emotional_Life_of_Populism.php
Over the last decade or so, psychologists have proposed a new concept that helps us understand the unique ways individuals may suffer after breaching their own ethical codes. That concept is call...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Must_We_Witness_to_Moral_Injury.php
I was confused when my tenth-grade English colleague began teaching various literary texts by first introducing four critical lenses. She felt students needed to understand how to interpret texts...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/To_Read_the_Bible.php
The Matrix is the ultimate millennial sci-fi movie: it came out in 1999 and made cinematic history. What if we were, after all, living in a computer simulation? Almost a quarter of a century late...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Jungian_Matrix.php
‘How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy’, a new book by John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato, is a well-written and insightful examination of a central question in internatio...
The modern occidental world, roughly from the Renaissance onwards, sprang from a secularisation of culture and its culmination is the main reason for the polarisation of the contemporary world. T...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Only_a_God_Can_Save_Us.php
Philosophy, social science, books, and magazines, as well as your mother and your next-door neighbor, all offer hints as to how to live well. There’s the Id, which you have to watch out for. An...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Personal_Operations_A_Guide_to_Living_Well.php
Under threatening gray skies...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Poetry/Watergate_in_the_country.php
John Yoder is not nearly as widely known as Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr. Yet, he is as significant as they, primarily because he politicizes Jesus in a convincing way. Christianity Today ranke...
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives, to create a monster they call Destiny. Heraclitus observed that if you sow a character, you inevitably reap one- a tyrant's authority for crime and ...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Wherefore_Art_Thou_Romeo.php
Miami Beach, Florida is one of the most well known resort cities in the world. However, during the 20th century this glitzy 'fun-in-the-sun' paradise was also a haven for elderly Jewish immigrant...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_History_of_Miami_Beach.php
Perhaps it’s human nature to expect only good things in life however, as the Buddha taught, because of our attachments to people and things, life involves suffering and, sooner or later, one wa...
One of my students recently bemoaned the fact that I put Nietzsche on the syllabus. Yes, he is an important thinker, but nihilism is so tiresome. Life is hard enough. Why not give students a phil...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/The_Appearance_of_Justice.php
It is a collective belief these days that the university is in a state of crisis. The diagnosis of this crisis offered by pundits, economists, and by university administrators are not the interes...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Higher-Education-and-the-Democratic-Ideal.php
Agape is an ancient Greek notion which goes something like this: get along with everybody; don’t make enemies; give at least as much as you expect to get; consider everyone kin, even if a tad d...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Agape-Diplomacy-The-Power-of-Caring-Charisma.php
The films of Zhang Yimou gave many Westerners our first and most vivid impressions of life in twentieth century China. The Frances Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg of Chinese filmmaking, Zhang s...
https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Paradox-of-China-Rise-and-the-Veneration-of-Mao.php
Protagoras was right. Man is still the measure of all things. Yet nowadays we’ve forgotten this. The happy illusion of our age is that we have transcended the mere human with information, which...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Wo-man-is-Still-the-Measure-of-All-Things.php
1967 was the most exciting time to be living in Montreal. To mark Canada’s centennial, the city hosted a world fair, Expo 67, and it opened its doors to visitors from all over the world. The Fa...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Women-of-Saturn.php
Not long after I moved away from the United States, a college student was arrested in Louisiana for burning an American flag. He was protesting the extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden. As o...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-I-Emigrated-from-America.php
Britain, and the EU generally, is in the throes of a crisis of confidence in its food supply. The largely unregulated and highly competitive process of producing what ends up on our plates has be...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Green-Economy-A-Load-of-Old-Bull.php
In September of 2012, the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel published a calm and dispassionate book challenging the reigning scientific orthodoxy of the day. In his book Mind and Cosmos, Nagel arg...
In 1956, in the dead-end of the Cold War, Horkheimer and Adorno embarked on recorded discussions in view of a new version of the Communist Manifesto for the new times (just as Brecht had in 1944 ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Leviathan-Belly.php
The controversy over whether the Wright Brothers were, in fact, the first humans to take to flight on December 17, 1903 in the famed Kitty Hawk in North Carolina has been an enduring one...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Wright-Brothers-Right-or-Wrong.php
In our house a hallway ran the length of the second floor, ending at my mother's bedroom. Standing outside my room, I could look down the hall and see whether her door was open, meaning that she ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Likeness-autobiographical-essays-by-Michael-Milburn.php
Some things never go out of style. This means, of course, comic novels published in England in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, they do go out of print...
A l'époque de son apogée, Emile Nellighan était un jeune gamin subtil et frileux, intellectuel mais pas livresque, aliénée par sa profonde solitude et angoissé par le manque de discours ave...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Emile-Nelligan-un-Dante-d-une-epoque-dechue.php
The emotions at the heart of contemporary American political discourse have undergone a dramatic shift. For decades, it was all about pride...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Political-Emotion-From-Pride-to-Envy.php
More than twenty years later, the legacy of Tiananmen Square remains, an unsolved problem. The prominent names in the struggle, such as Wang Juntao, the mentor of the student leaders, or Wang Dan...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Legacy-of-Tiananmen-Square.php
Gains and losses; costs and benefits. Thinking in these terms comes naturally to most of us today. And for this we largely have economists to thank...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Adam-Smith-and-the-Character-of-Virtue.php
After the end of Cold War in the early 1990s, the new millennium sees a return of autocracy and decline of democracy worldwide.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Democracy-in-Retreat.php
The 'Chinese dream' (Zhongguo meng), put forth by the new leader Xi Jinping, aspires to match the American dream. Before we dismiss it as just another copycat slogan, let us consider that in hist...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Character-of-U-S-China-Relations.php
Gilbert Rozman on National Identities and Bilateral Relations: Widening Gaps in East Asia and Chinese Demonization of the United States.
State policies on religion are the result of ideological struggles between the defenders of two types of secularism. In the US, the dominant ideology is 'passive secularism,' which allows public ...
SEOUL, Republic of Korea (ROK), June 2001. For reasons of security photography in Kimpo Airport is forbidden. The drive into the city crosses the massive rust-colored Songson Bridge. It was a wet...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/South_Korea_in_the_early_2000s.php
The recent visit of Dennis Rodman and members of the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea raises the spectre of Ping-Pong diplomacy in the normalization of relations between China and the U.S. Tra...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Future-of-the-Korean-Peninsula.php
In March this year, the moulting of the political structure of the People's Republic of China was completed at the annual plenary session of the National People's Congress and the old faces at th...
The Giants had just won the Super Bowl and the spring semester was underway. The forecast had called for snow...
Class, today's topic is: The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who wear neckties and those who comment on those who wear neckties. Discuss...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Necktie-and-the-Human-Condition.php
In February 2011, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned after the armed forces sided with several thousand protesters who had gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square to demand his removal. With the...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Egypt-The-Fall-of-Mohammad-Morsi.php
Many political scientists, economists and other social scientists, as well as your average layperson, have tended to assume that human beings are rational. Yet, scholars of cognitive psychology h...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Fateful-Decisions-and-Foreign-Policy.php
They traveled north through the city of Weimar and approached the compound at daybreak. It was overcast, and ash sat atop the lofty barbed wire barrier...
Love is a strong, problematic word, especially put against another word, action. Love and action are like two worlds, separated by abyss. We speak about them with passion and conviction, but do w...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Karl-Barth-Romans-Hannah-Arendt-The-Human-Condition.php
In Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson, scholar Alec Marsh traces the economic theories that ran through the work of modernist poets...
We are always cloaked in what has come before. But for decades I have held close to my heart a belief I discovered in Helene Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conscious-Evolution.php
Peace, jobs, and prosperity in the 21st century may hinge partly on positive relations between the United States and China. And that raises a critical question: Will these countries get into a ne...
As dawn arises in the Mbya tribe, one of the last remnants of the once large group of the Tupi- Guarani Amerindians, in the jungle of large trees inside what is now Paraguay, very often a pa’i,...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Power-Without-Violence-A-Lesson-from-Tribal-Communism.php
The first time I read a short story by Etgar Keret, I was working at Symphony Space, a performing arts center in New York....
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Interview-with-Etgar-Keret.php
An American president, feted as the inviolable creature of Camelot, accompanied by a pristine, porcelain wife and a sense of opportunity, is felled by an assassin while touring Dallas on November...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Conspiracy-and-the-Death-of-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy.php
Jokes, jazz, psychoanalysis, sex, magic, Manhattan: scholars, critics, and commentators have scrutinized the obsessions and influences of Woody Allen's films, but his relationship to wealth remai...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Woody-Allen-and-Wealth.php
Many thinkers of recent decades have told us that science shows that humans are merely complicated machines, and that our actions are almost totally predetermined by our brain states, themselves ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Mind-Brain-and-Free-Will.php
François Rabelais was born towards the end of the 15 th century near Chinon, France. After receiving an education in French Catholic schools, he became a monk in the Order of St. Benedict, later...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rabelais-Brother-John-Humor-and-Humanism.php
Rabelais est né vers la fin du XV siècle près de Chinon. Après avoir reçu une formation dans les couvents catholiques français, il est devenu moine dans l'Ordre de Saint-Benoît, autrement ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Frere-Jean-portrait-de-la-personne-ideale-selon-Rabelais.php
Tea bowls are alive! Were I to assert this proposition in causal conversation with you, you might well think that I had been imbibing something a wee bit stronger than tea...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-Tokyo-Contemplating-Tea-Bowls.php
Is it reasonable to defend a corporate policy which shouts 'Gotcha!' to the vacationer who balks at boarding a cruise ship due to hurricane conditions and requests a refund? Many instances of cor...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Are-You-Thinking-about-Taking-a-Cruise.php
Just off the main drag in Karaganda, a coal mining and industrial city in northern Kazakhstan, the EcoMuseum is housed on the first floor of a local government administration building. You have t...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Baikonur-Cosmodrome.php
Traditional Judaism severely curtailed the role women could play in the arena of religious duties. Women were viewed as necessarily limited by biology, as Jewish law considered women unclean duri...
'The plebs' is the name of an experience, that of achieving human dignity through political agency. The plebs designates neither a social category nor an identity but rather a fundamental politic...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Plebean-Experience.php
It's been fifteen years now that I've been changing the dining room chandelier light bulbs. Fifteen years of paying the bills and sitting in the driver's seat of the large blue Buick and cooking ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Lucky-Lady-Short-story-by-Stefanie-Levine-Cohen.php
I made my Jarry Park debut at night, on a YMCA day-camp sponsored outing. The stadium felt alive, charged and vivid. The brilliant light towers, whose bulbs I tried to count, brought the grass, t...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Jarry-Park-Education.php
It's a long way, in geographical distance and creative quality, from the down and dirty world of MTV's reality show hit Buckwild to the rarefied world of U.S. public television's Downton Abbey, b...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Buckwild-and-Downton-Abbey-TVs-Social-Reality.php
The other day, when stuck on a website dealing with my research area, global energy security, a thought hit me: am I website challenged--unable to navigate the increasingly complex internet sites...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Hey-Website-Makers-Shape-Up.php
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently exhibiting Chris Burden's Metropolis II, a 20-by-30 foot, multi-storied installation circulating 1,100 toy cars about 100 times over 18 traffic w...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Metropolis-Two-by-Chris-Burden.php
There's a word that the winemakers here use, it's 'invaiatura'-the moment when the grapes change color, they stop growing and begin ripening...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Invaiatura-Short-story-by-Joel-Burcat.php
It was Lee Leffert who convinced my parents that I should be taken seriously as an artist. He was the bachelor brother of the next-door neighbors on Tyne Boulevard in Nashville. Tall, athletic, a...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Heart-Of-Florence.php
The immense complexity of some industrial organizations and their tight internal connections occasionally allowed even some small local failures, inevitable in complex systems, to cascade through...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Normal-Accidents-Living-with-High-Risk-Technologies.php
Edward Luttwak: I don't know anyone willing to do anything about Syria in the sense of knocking off Assad, which we could do in one day of air strikes...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Syria-Thirty-Years-War.php
Recent scandals in Canada, laid bare by Quebec's Charbonneau Commission and the press, have shown how a tight network of city bosses, construction kings and political fund raisers can determine t...
A recent report by the International Energy Agency concluded that the United States will displace Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer by 2020. If that does occur, what would it mean ...
The post-communist transitions are over. Socialism's command economy was successfully dismantled, but unexpected and distorted forms of capitalism arose in its place, often of a thuggish characte...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Capital-Coercion-and-Post-Communist-States.php
The historical evidence shows that cities progress through three early phases – as centres of commerce, centres of industry, and then transportation hubs – before becoming financial centres.....
Since death Niccolo Machiavelli has had a long career in the popular culture. His name spawned the adjective ‘Machiavellian' and the noun ‘Machiavellianism.' Not a week passes but that some j...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Machiavellian-intelligence-in-primates-and-Machiavelli.php
Few people in the West believed during the Cold War that the USSR was what its founders and leaders thought it to be. Lenin and Stalin designed it as a new type of federation – a union of ethni...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Soviet-Union-Federation-or-Empire.php
For a millennium, from the seventh to the seventeenth century, Muslims controlled the intercontinental and transoceanic trade between Europe and the Indian Ocean. While doing this, they also crea...
In an essay called 'Among the Ruins' about three twentieth-century writers, Bruce Chatwin writes, 'On the island of Capri there lived three narcissists who each built a house on the edge of a cli...
The peculiar alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia, forged during World War II and lubricated by oil, is being reshaped by dramatic shifts in global petroleum markets.Saudi Arabia's...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-U-S-Saudi-Alliance-and-the-Changing-Dynamics-of-Oil.php
Leonard Cohen once remarked: 'the kind of thing I like is that you write a song, and it slips into the world, and they forget who wrote it. And it moves and it changes, and you hear it again 300 ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/I-Am-Your-Man-The-Life-of-Leonard-Cohen.php
John Donne has engaged the minds of poets and literary critics for centuries, but what makes him so engaging? Is it the play and paradox of his verse, the audacity of his meter, the range of comp...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Analysis-of-John-Donne-A-Poet-of-Death.php
The phrase Zero Dark Thirty is mysterious and ominous, but meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the lingo of the United States Armed Forces. Kathryn Bigelow, director of the film with this title...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Zero-Dark-Thirty-Heroism-Torture-Propaganda.php
Neo-mercantilism is alive and well 100 years later, as we see in the press, speeches in Congress, and in the recent US presidential debates, where promises of an elusive 'energy independence' ech...
In 1960, Dwight Macdonald published 'Masscult and Midcult' in the Partisan Review. Here Macdonald introduced his distinction between what he called masscult—or what is more commonly labeled 'lo...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Masscult-and-Midcult-Essays-Against-the-American-Grain.php
For the last quarter of a century we have been witnessing an understandable, although unsavoury, spectacle that can be called 'poisoning the wells.' Wells are poisoned in war so that no one shoul...
On November 18, 2012, history was made when Tawadros II was crowned the 118th Coptic Pope in a lineage that started around the year 49 CE, when Mark the Evangelist arrived in Alexandria...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Popes-of-Egypt.php
Most of us recognize this: that it's not in our long-term best interest to act in our short-term self-interest. But not everyone does. That's why we need mechanisms to induce trust. That's why we...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Liars-and-Outliers-Bruce-Schneier.php
I've been reading Virginia Woolf since high school, and with more focus and intensity in the past five years. It was when I read The Waves for the first time, while living in Thailand and studyin...
Let us now exhume the corpse of Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I will bring this work into the light from the dark recessed dungeons of scholarly contention, s...
It would be a serious error to think the financial crisis resulted from a glitch in the market for mortgage backed securities, or flaws in computer programs at credit rating agencies, or the fail...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Ethical-Lessons-of-the-Financial-Crisis.php
You can swallow the 'gout du bonheur' for only five Euros at L'as du fallafel in the Rue de Rosiers in the Marais in Paris. The taste of happiness...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Super-Bowl-Sunday-on-the-Seine.php
King Lear's Edmund surely ranks among the most despised figures of Shakespearean drama and is often held up as a villain par excellence. A close reading of I.ii and V.iii, however, reveals Edmund...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Re-Reading-of-Edmund-in-Shakespeare-King-Lear.php
Like his predecessors, LaBute creates characters who are psychologically damaged, but what distinguishes LaBute is his obsessive focus on misogyny. It's hard to find a LaBute play that doesn't fe...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Neil-LaBute-by-D-J-Lee.php
When my wife Mary and I got married in 1961, the future looked golden. She gave up a promising career as a fashion illustrator to raise a family. I pursued a law career that culminated in my appo...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Justice-James-Clarke-Swervings-of-the-Heart.php
'Stay out the way, it's a Southern Thing,' sings Patterson Hood of The Drive-By Truckers. Of course, Hood's is not the only voice warning that outsiders won't ever 'get' this 'Southern thing.' Pl...
Dialogues with Rawi Hage at St. James United Church...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Montreal-Literary-Art-Events.php
Patriotism, to quote George Bernard Shaw, 'is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.' The same may be said of American exceptionalism...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-Exceptionalism-American-Freedom.php
Since my first trip to Europe in the early 1970s I’ve seen Germany become not only the dominant financial power of the Continent but also a model for how to memorialize a violent past...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Giving-Barbarism-its-Due.php
In 2003, Mark Lilla published his book The Stillborn God, that examines the tension between modern political philosophy and a more messianic political theology. Lilla claims that modern European ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/What-is-Political-Theology-and-Why-Does-it-Matter.php
It starts out to be a perfectly ordinary day; a mild, erratically windy morning on which the sky seems undecided between sun and rain and the shrinking hours hint at nothing beyond the usual smal...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Autumn-Irena-Karafilly.php
I first discovered Mikhail Bulgakov in an anthology of Soviet science fiction. I was a 9th grade nebbish and budding Slavophile haunting the shelves of the Forest Hill Public Library. I wasn’t ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Comic-Morality-of-Mikhail-Bulgakov.php
Although German Reunification commemorated its 25th anniversary last year, the German art scene continues to be weirdly bipolar. By zooming in on individual careers of artists, however, one may c...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Hartwig-Ebersbach-Abstract-Avant-garde-Painting-in-GDR.php
In the second decade of the third millennium fast divisions between high art and popular entertainment are dissolving. On the one hand, popular fiction is increasingly recognized not only as a cr...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Art%20of-Artertainment.php
On April 8, 2016 the Vatican issued the English translation of Amoris Laetitia, the Joy of Love, written by Pope Francis. The document consists of 325 paragraphs arranged in eight chapters and ta...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Pope-Francis-and-the-Joy-of-Love.php
For a young Montrealer growing up in the 1960s and 70s, China seemed like a far away, almost imaginary place, with utopian communities like Shangri-La and Xanadu (I’ve since visited both places...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-Montreal-to-Beijing-Daniel-A-Bell.php
It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon in the nation’s capital, September 27th, 2015; the day after Chinese President Xi Xinping departed for New York City. Chinese flags placed on the light posts alo...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Cracks-Global-Powers.php
Neuroscience has had limited disciplinary connectivity to the field of International Relations (IR) and Politics. The field of IR is traditionally understood to be about the relations between sta...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Cracks-Global-Powers.php
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, rejected the view that we are immaterial souls temporarily resident in our physical bodies. We are just complicated flesh machi...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-defence-of-the-soul.php
We are permitted to judge merely the act of man, his momentous will as expressed in the case. We pronounce a verdict over the casus, and over the particular action, a verdict according to the tru...
My aim is to convince you of a few things, mostly about time. But, more than that, I want to ease your suffering...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/There-is-No-Future-Tree.php
The problem with the zettabyte problem is that, even though the proportion of what is culturally valuable to the totality of the cultural information may not have changed (and how would you know?...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Zettabyte-Problem.php
Not long ago I had the good fortune to see the Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer at The Frick Collection in New York City. The painting was part of a visiting exhibit of fifteen paint...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Girl-with-a-Pearl-Earring.php
The historical record suggests that the religious/secular divide is not easily separated into distinct component parts. This is certainly true with respect to overlapping motivations within indiv...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the-myth-of-religious-violence.php
It is difficult to view the intellectual trends of the past 50 years—or even the past 200 years, for that matter—alongside the argument of this book without thinking that this argument is eit...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Foundations-of-Natural-Morality.php
What does it mean to be secular? At one time, secularization was thought to be an inevitable consequence of modernization. With the shift from traditional communities to complex, differentiated s...
The declared objective of Islamists has been to bring unity and power to Muslims and elevate their religion to a model for the world to follow. Ironically, they have only succeeded in creating po...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Politicized-Islam-and-an-ideological-war-of-attrition.php
Secularism is not as 'secular' as we are used to hear. In fact, secularism is the unexpected 'child' of Christianity; a child that many non-Christian societies have tried to adopt. This child, me...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Crisis-of-Liberal-Secularism.php
There was a time when universities provided a hospitable environment for intellectual experimentation, the questioning of prevailing conventions and the pursuit of robust debate. Even at times wh...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Do-Not-Turn-The-University-Into-A-Clinic.php
In 1812 Napoleon Bonaparte, at the heights of his power, set out for the most adventurous, and ultimately fatal, military campaign. Napoleon’s Grand Army of over 500,000 men, the largest force ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/the-emotional-amoral-egoism-of-states.php
There is a kind of fusion of religion and politics in contemporary Russia. This does not mean that there is a de-secularization of the Russian state and society; rather we witness a recovery and ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ideology-of-Vladimir-Putin-Regime.php
The ladder of silence consists of seven steps. The first step is habitual prayer. The second step is to speak only when necessary, whatever necessary, to the extent possible...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Ladder-of-Silence.php
It is an ancient tale, born thousands of years ago in a remote and shadowy epoch — a story which would be codified many centuries later by the great poets and dramatists who helped compel their...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Barack-Obama-and-the-Pious-Mob.php
Many years ago, my mother and I were driving down Russell Hill Road in Toronto. I had been living outside of Canada for a while and we were in the long process of catching up. My mother asked me ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Bob-Dylan-and-the-American-Past.php
Back at the end of the 1960s, this movie (M.A.S.H.), at least to me, had seemed like a huge hilarious middle finger to The Man. Watergate hadn’t happened yet (the Watergate Hotel in Washington,...
It started with Torrent. In the Internet’s under-toe, a bunch of us were desperate to cobble together a film or video game from the scraps of free-floating bits and bytes...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/A-Generation-of-Scrappers.php
The greatest discovery of all is the question; the realization that our mind can leap forward from ignorance to curiosity, from appearance to doubt, from assumption to fact – and the consequent...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Greatest-Discovery-of-All.php
One might conceive of Moses as a Kafkaesque figure, a person of uncertain speech and identity, a son of two cultures, commanded by Hashem - the Almighty - to talk Pharaoh into freeing the Hebrew ...
Book Review of Nicholas Ruddick's 'Science Fiction Adapted to Film'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/In-the-Beginning-Was-the-Word-then-Came-the-Film-Version.php
'Virtue often consists only in a willingness to give in to the smaller vice...'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Fein-on-Idol-Worship-Robert-Wexelblatt.php
Back in the year two thousand, Peter Swirski took his interdisciplinary approach to Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem. Rather than gushing over their artistic talent, Swirski focused on the exten...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Where-literature-meets-science-and-philosophy.php
As a Slavophile, Solzhenitsyn thoroughly rejected any Western solutions for Russia or for individual Russians living the Soviet nightmare. Instead, he believed that to survive, whether as individ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Solzhenitsyn-One-Day-in-the-Life-of-Ivan-Denisovich.php
Historians tell us that the University of Paris in the early 13th century was defined by its universal acceptance of a philosophical dogma derived from Plato and mandated by the Church, namely a ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Linguistic-Realism.php
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a philosophical meditation, in the tradition of Susan Sontag or Camus, on climate change and how to approach and think about climate change from a humanisti...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Interview-with-Roy-Scranton.php
At the end of the day, we have to establish a new narrative, a new formula for Europe. It has to be one that citizens can identify with and, ideally, is acceptable to those who are suspicious of ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Europe-Brexit-and-the-Kantian-garden.php
As Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI continually reiterated, Europe should not turn its back on its Christian roots which have shaped its values and institutions. This does not mean a return to...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Christian-Democratic-origins-of-the-European-Project.php
I recently came across a 1994 volume of the cultural journal Dædalus, still published today by MIT. What initially attracted me was the cover, a colourful oil sketch of Muscovite cupolas, and th...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Shifting-Europe-a-historical-view.php
Along with jihad, hijra is one of the most powerful buzzwords in the vocabulary of the Islamic State. Signifying the obligation to migrate lands under Muslim rule, hijra has become a recruiting t...
Mark Twain once quipped that the 'trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so.' Twain wasn’t talking about energy, which was hardl...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Myths-of-the-Oil-Boom.php
David Shields’ 2010 anti-novel Reality Hunger is a kind of 205-page manifesto composed of 618 brief numbered sections, the longest no more than a few pages, though most are limited to a few sen...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Advent-of-Virtual-Realism.php
In May 1831, at the age of 25, Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States as part of a commission of two to study the American prison system, returning to France nine months later to writ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Toqueville-America.php
There’s an old prayer, attributed to St. Catherine of Siena: 'Thank you, God, for giving me what I didn’t know I needed.' The 'what' for me is the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Catholic-Worker-Movement.php
Einat Wilf was a member of the Knesset between 2010-2013, representing a break-away Labour party faction under Ehud Barak. A graduate of Harvard University, she holds a Ph.D. in political science...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Rumpus-in-The-Middle-East.php
Computers and literature, computers and art, computers and creative imagination—among hundreds of questions related to the relationship between human mind and machines, Peter Swirski also asks ...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-Literature-to-Biterature.php
Centuries of human endeavor including animal domestication, agriculture, market economy, industrialization, science, have come between the Garden of Eden and us. This regrettable separation has i...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-big-city-as-Garden-of-Eden.php
"Undisciplined" notes on Reinhold Niebuhr and Eric Voegelin...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/State-and-Ideology-Notes-on-Niebuhr-and-Voegelin.php
THE MONTREAL REVIEW IS NOW ACCEPTING BOOK REVIEWS AND LONG-FORM CRITICAL ESSAYS ON SUBJECTS RELATED TO THE FIELDS OF THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THEORY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ...
Thoughtful discourse about cultural politics is jeopardized by the intrusion of ideological abstractions. In an attempt to avoid them, I’ll begin with two personal anecdotes...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Desire-Passion-and-the-Politics-of-Culture.php
Before Amanda Bynes went loopy, we had never heard of her. Maybe we missed her on Oprah. Now that we think of it, she probably never went on Oprah...
I have an idea for a short story, but doubt my ability to pull it off. I haven’t written any stories since high school, where I received enough encouragement to convince me to apply to a fictio...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Reflections-on-Literary-Craft.php
In recent years 'Weimar-talk' has been an important part of American political pundits’ toolkit. Soon after September 11 it was common to regard George W. Bush’s 'War on Terror' as a modern v...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-to-Speak-Weimar.php
Several hills and valleys into my first day of walking the 100 km St. Cuthbert Way from Melrose Scotland to Holy Island, England, I stopped to check my bearings and time. I'd arrived at a point o...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Following-the-Saints-Footfall-by-Footfall.php
In the spring of 1972, I headed from the States to Europe with that wave of young North Americans for whom an international adventure was an essential experience in the new era of personal growth...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Silence-of-the-Acropolis.php
My copy of 'Loaves and Fishes: The Story of the Catholic Worker Movement' is falling apart. There is almost nothing holding it together...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/To-Find-The-Catholic-Movement.php
The Québec referendums of 1980 and 1995, conducted by René Lévesque and Jacques Parizeau, were essentially a response to pressures from within the Parti Québécois, from party stalwarts not t...
Syria is awash with war crimes. The people suffer deliberatively inflicted hardship and harm. This is war marked by war crimess--the hallmark of the last three decades, where almost every armed c...
The air was the hot and heavy sort common just before the monsoon. It had a peculiar mixture of industrial strength antiseptic combined with the usual village smells of blossoming flowers and rot...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Human-Desperation-and-the-Limits-of-Modern-Medicine.php
The Presbyterian poet Marianne Moore comes out of a religious tradition that has been largely severed from the literary and artistic world...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Marianne-Moore-and-the-Just-War-Tradition.php
Politics may be boring like hell to the outsiders, but not to those at the trough. Look again at the legislative floor, prompts Peter Swirski in American Utopia and Social Engineering, his recent...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/American-Political-Fictions.php
Revelation or the Apocalypse of John is one of the most provocative texts in the Bible. It has inspired great art and music, even as it has fueled speculation about the imminent end of the world....
On a week-day morning last fall I welcomed a group of well-dressed adults into my ninth grade classroom. It was Grandparents Day at the school where I teach English, and the development office ha...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Springtime-in-the-land-of-mothballs.php
The man at the registration desk takes possession of my phone and valuables. 'Do you have any questions?' he asks. I hesitate. I have too many to think of the right one. I have just voluntarily h...
Ever since the European Enlightenments, the English and Scottish 'sociology of virtue' has been in conflict with the French 'ideology of reason'. For the British philosophers the essence of human...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Post-Rational-Management.php
Democracies are not inherently utopian, but the aim of the modern democratic longing – an age of equality, free from privation and strife – unmistakably is. That those who harbor this longing...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Nietzsche-and-Tocqueville-on-Our-Democratic-Future.php
The levels of sophistication of science to date might not have managed to fully grasp ‘what man is like’ in neurobiological terms, yet Chekov’s instinct was sound: acquiring an accurate por...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Who-are-we-Neurochemical-man-and-emotional-amoral-egoism.php
The really great philosophers have enormous influence over the centuries. To take the measure of their impact is to understand European intellectual history in its broad outlines. Kant, Descartes...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Ethics-After-Aristotle.php
Several years ago, my colleague Adam Nadel and I took confessions from a group of convicted war criminals. They were veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army who, during the Second Sino-Japanese wa...
The working title of my first book was 'What is Engineering?' I had begun asking that question of myself in earnest the late 1970s. At the time, I had earned three degrees in engineering; I had w...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/To-Engeneer-is-Human-To-Forgive-Design.php
Before there was post-modernism, there was modernism. Before there was deconstructionism, there was existentialism. I belong to that earlier time...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/How-I-Became-An-Existentialist.php
I rounded the busy corner at the traffic circle, dodging the mass of humanity that slides through Delhi on any given morning. Between all the movement I caught a glimpse of him, and as I slipped ...
I had my first taste of coffee from a glass mug featuring a Mercator projection map of the world. I was ten years old, seated at my grandparents' kitchen table. Grandma had ordered the mugs somet...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Coffee-from-the-Kitchen-Table-to-the-Global-Stage.php
Many who have spent some length of time in Rwanda will know that the place has a certain feel to it. Perhaps they can’t quite put their finger on it, and some might even ignore it – but one c...
I grew up and spent 22 years of my life in Ashdod, an Israeli city located 25 kilometers north of the place we call Gaza. I’ve lived for thirty years in total — and not a single time have I e...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Truth-about-Gaza.php
A bitter gale sliced its way through the heart of Amsterdam the night of February 22nd, 1672, causing "severe cold and dryness," the Hollandse Mercurius later recorded. Dryness is not what one de...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-indefatigable-agenda.php
Stuart A. Kurtz on Kirby Olson's article 'Marianne Moore and the Just War Tradition'
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Letters-Stuart-A-Kurtz-Marianne-Moore.php
The encounter with death has been a central theme in Western philosophy in general and in Existential philosophy in particular. The other boundary of human existence, birth, has been treated at b...
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Existential-Encounter.php
Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance.
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/From-comrades-to-enemies.php