Historians hail Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press circa 1440 as a seminal shift in human civilization, and so it has been. It would take another nearly four centuries, until 1826, before Nicéphore Niépce captured “View from the Window at Le Gras” via a “heliotrope” process that has been immortalized as the world’s first photograph. Parlor game enthusiasts might argue these centuries later about whether Niépce’s picture was worth more or less than any proverbial thousand words set to type by Gutenberg. But what we have learned as we creep up on the 200th anniversary of Niépce’s accomplishment is that…
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Two visions for How to Be in the World, shared a week ago, on Easter Sunday, the Christian world’s holiest day of the year, the veritable heart of the faith that has buoyed billions of people over the millennia. First, excerpts from Pope Francis’s final papal address, his last full day on earth: “Today at last, the singing of the “alleluia” is heard once more in the Church, passing from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, and this makes the people of God throughout the world shed tears of joy…Jesus is not in the tomb, he is alive! Love…
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When no less a classic cultural and political conservative than David Brooks declares it is “Time for a Civic Uprising” in his “New York Times” column Thursday, joined by his also moderately-inclined colleague Ezra Klein declaring on his side of the page, “The Emergency Is Here,” you know we are in a heap of trouble. Not even 100 days into Trump redux, we are now facing the fully flowering existential threat that most Democrats feared and warned about all through the fall election cycle, only to be dismissed because too many American voters, if one is to believe the polling…
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Nearly a century ago, the noted journalist, cultural critic, essayist, and—this is important: satirist— H.L. Mencken wrote of his fellow Americans, sounding very much like a British journalist dispatched to our sprawling land to take its pulse and assess its mood, “What makes America charming is precisely the Americans…They are, by long odds, the most charming people that I have ever encountered in this world.” Knowing better than to completely trust Mencken’s often pointed satire, I was waiting for a punch line or at the very least an elaboration of his almost chirpy salute to the American persona. It didn’t…
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Sixty-five years after his untimely death at age 46, Albert Camus remains one of the leading lights of existentialism, a philosophy that has its roots in the 19th century’s version of dark brooding intellectuals—names like Kierkegaard, Neitszche, and Dostoevsky. But existentialism really hit its stride in Post-World War II Europe, and the Algerian-born, French-identified Camus was and arguably remains its most eloquent spokesperson. Camus was born in 1913 in Algeria when it was still under the colonial rule of France. His father was a peasant fieldworker who died in battle in World War I when Camus was just a year…