Salo
Rick Van Kooten Following the bleak nihilism of Cat’s Cradle, the next novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, presents a more optimistic side of Vonnegut’s philosophy, even as it is presented as a blistering satire as in Cat’s Cradle. In many ways, Vonnegut’s body of work up to this point could be considered not only a literary project …
Jonathan Elmer Howard W. Campbell Jr. is a playwright and a spy. What is the relation between the two? At the level of narrative, the relation is as intimate as can be. When Frank Wirtanen approaches Campbell about spying for the Americans, he indicates that he fixed on Campbell because of the “medieval romances” he writes: “you love pure …
Ted Castronova Who’s in charge, anyway? We believe that we have free will, but perhaps we are under the control of a higher being. What if that being is under the control of another being? Who is under the control of another, and so on and so on? Andrew Dabrowski of Indiana University’s mathematics department has developed a metaphysical theory …
Sarah Phillips Anthropologists think a lot about bodies. Biological anthropologists are interested in the adaptation, variation, and evolutionary history of humans and their relatives, looking at the bodies of humans and our ancestors, living and extinct. Medical anthropologists investigate the human body from a range of perspectives, focusing on how perceptions and experiences of the body and of …
The Sirens of Titan is a novel of ideas that takes the reader on an imaginative romp through the solar system. Three timeless philosophical questions are explored in the course of Malachi Constant’s space odyssey: the metaphysical question of whether free will is an illusion; the moral question of whether good ends can justify evil means; and, most prominently, the existential question of the meaning of life—that is, the question of whether an individual human life has a purpose, and, if so, what that purpose is.
Read HERE about Kurt Vonnegut’s fan mail collection held in the Lilly Library.
Rebekah Sheldon I love Laundromats. No, it’s true! They are perfect. In any decent-sized city, there’s bound to be a 24-hour Laundromat nearby. When we lived in Brooklyn, we would smash our bags of wash into the wheeled conveyances that I grew up calling “granny carts” but that Google tells me are sold as “utility wagons.” Now that I …
