As a way of finding some interesting distraction in the social isolation of Covid-19 I have been reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. The book primarily treats the way that literate English soldiers, educated in a certain way and immersed in a particular public school culture, found words and phrases to capture part …
Academic social media
The means through which academics engage in communication and discussion of their ideas have changed significantly in the past decade through the rapid growth of the importance of social media in the dissemination of new ideas. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress have become important media for communication in a …
Grand Hotel Abyss
Georg Lukács in 1962 used the colorful image of a fictional "Grand Hotel Abyss" to express his disappointment in the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Here is a passage in which the idea is described in "Preface to the Theory of the Novel" (link): A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have …
Public intellectuals in France and the US
What is the role of the intellectual in France in 2010? And has that role declined in the past several decades? Have the media and the internet profoundly eroded or devalued the voice of the intellectual in public space? The Nouvel Observateur takes up these questions in a recent issue devoted to "Le pouvoir intellectuel" …
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Understanding Society 