Since 2001 The Common Review has published essays about the books and ideas that matter. Whether the topic is women and Islam or the pleasures of Proust, we are committed to tough, street-smart prose that will challenge, amuse, and sometimes offend—all in the service of building the most thoughtful community of readers in America today. Scroll down to view selected articles from the Spring 2009 issue of the magazine. Better yet, subscribe today ($17.95 for four issues) or pick up a copy of The Common Review at your local bookstore.
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From the Editor
Watching as “the crisis in the humanities” grows to epic proportions—370,000 Google hits by my last count—I think about other crises in my lifetime that have shaken Western civilization. Specifically, I recall the attack in Dissent magazine that philosopher Richard Rorty made on my mentor Irving Howe fifteen years ago. Though brusque, Rorty conducted himself carefully, for this was, after all, the magazine Howe had founded, and the two men had been close friends and intellectual comrades. But Rorty was fed up with certain grandiose words and phrases echoing through the academy, and he was intent on dialing down the volume. He went after Howe for daring to use the phrase “the crisis of modern society.” Read this article.
Feature Articles
What is at the end of your fork? To ask this question is to plunge into a search for answers that are difficult to discover, but if discovered, leave most of us wishing we had never bothered asking in the first place. Ignorance can be, if not bliss, then at least something that doesn’t ruin lunch. Yet for even the most indifferent eaters, the realities of America’s food production system are increasingly difficult to avoid. Read this article.
By now it is common knowledge that American newspapers are dying or, at best, in trouble. In response to this crisis, the entire November/December 2009 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review was devoted to a long article called “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” (published online here). Shortly after, The Common Review commissioned Scott Sherman—a contributing writer of The Nation and a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review —to ask Professor Schudson further questions about this proposed “reconstruction.” Here is their conversation in New York City, November 24, 2009. Read this article.
Across the street from Jonathan Gottschall’s office in the English Department at Washington and Jefferson University is Mark Shrader’s mixed martial arts center. The place is all in your face, advertising the many ways they can train you to break someone’s nose: karate, boxing, cage fighting. Gottschall is an adjunct English professor, and a brief tour of Washington and Jefferson’s campus had ended here, in a small office he shares with four other adjuncts, with windows that look out on the suburban dojo. Read this article.
Reviews
University of California Chancellor Clark Kerr once wrote that “few institutions are so conservative as the universities about their own affairs while their members are so liberal about the affairs of others. . . . The faculty member who gets arrested as a ‘freedom rider’ in the South is a flaming supporter of unanimous prior faculty consent to any change whatsoever on his campus in the North.” Louis Menand quotes Kerr’s witticism in the introduction to his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, which takes as its point of departure the paradox that professors love radical change so long as it doesn’t apply to them.Read this review.
William B. Irvine’s book differs from those by other twentieth-century Stoics, notably Victor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946) and Jim Stockdale (Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, 1995). Those authors apply Stoic ideas to unusual adversities: Frankl’s book grew out of his experience in a German concentration camp, and Stockdale reflects on being a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Their books also reinforce the conventional view of Stoicism: in Irvine’s words, “passive individuals . . . grimly resigned to being on the receiving end of the world’s abuse and injustice.” Instead, Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy situates Stoic philosophy for those of us living in less extreme circumstances. Irvine’s book speaks to more mundane experience. Read this review.
