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The Critique of Pure Idiocy, and Other News

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On the Shelf

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Kant’s home, vandalized.

  • Outside Kaliningrad, Immanuel Kant’s home still stands, and now it’s adorned with a loving note in his memory: “Kant is a moron.” Russian police have made it their categorical imperative to find the vandals. “With Arthur Schopenhauer dead for 155 years, however, authorities start off with few strong leads.”
  • The Pittsburgh Tax Review—subscribe now—features a new paper by Arthur Cockfield called “David Foster Wallace on Tax Policy, How to Be an Adult, and Other Mysteries of the Universe,” presumably focusing on The Pale King. “The drudgery of taxes is what attracted Wallace to the subject, Cockfield argues. And, he says, Wallace has helpful advice for those of us bogged down by tax season.”
  • “I hate literature,” Varlam Shalamov wrote in a 1965 letter. Nonetheless, he did well by it. “Between 1954 and 1973, Shalamov wrote 147 stories about Russian prisons, transit camps, the mines of Kolyma, life in the camp hospitals, and the troubled experience of returning home … the more you read, the less documentary-like the experience becomes … particular images and phrases repeat; objects exhibit a strong symbolic power; meanings double, as accounts of daily camp life take on aesthetic and philosophical dimensions.”
  • “The flower’s leaves … serve as bridal beds which the creator has so gloriously arranged … and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much greater solemnity.” Scientists remember Carl Linnaeus today for his binomial system, but his writing on botany was, for the time, frankly sexual. The Encyclopedia Britannica referred to his work as “disgusting strokes of obscenity.”
  • “When the people shall have nothing to eat, they will eat the rich,” Rousseau wrote. But what if intraclass cannibals beat them to it? In Britain, the landed gentry have started hunting themselves for sport.