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• The Many Self-Reinventions of Toyo Ito

  

  Ito’s design pointed ahead in two ways. On the one hand it realised the modernist principle of transparency, exposing certain structural elements, but it did so with a hint of contradiction, by advertising its content like a boutique window: the inside was brought out into the city, but it was also encased as a display, with a glassy façade that looks like one of Jeff Koon’s readymade vacuum cleaner installations. A kind of high street modernism, it disrupted the canon in a second way by estranging the controlled, homogenous rationality of the grid.

  By William Harris.

• Leftovers

  

  ‘The guests applauded after each brief narrative, each one better than the last, if that were even possible, each story peppered with words like “corndog” and “Pop Tart”, and characters called Hermit Bob and “the girl in purple”. They laughed at the funny moments—of which there were plenty—and at the spoonerisms, Huck Finn becoming Fuck Hinn, and they wondered why that spoonerism had never occurred to them before, it seemed so obvious, but that was why the famous lady author was so famous, because she saw things that no one else saw and heard things that no one else heard; she had the ability to explain the unexplainable in the simplest of words wrought into beautiful sentences.’

  By Catherine Brereton.

• The Oddity

  

  I had to agree: “Carbs are righteous.”

  “Yeah they are, I love carbs more than life.”

  “Without carbs, life itself would be impossible.”

  “So true, EJ. I just want to smash loaves of fresh baked bread into my face all day long.”

  “What?”

  “You know, not even eat it. Just smash my face with those carbs.”

  Chapter 4 of EJ Spode‘s novel The Oddity.

• Wittgenstein’s Ethical Enterprise and Related Matters

  

  I am very firmly of the view that philosophy needs to be aware of the non-philosophical investigations going on in its very many neighbouring disciplines (whether that is in history or in mathematics or in art or in psychiatry: it’s not as if everything that isn’t philosophy is science), without surrendering its responsibilities to any of them. After all, quite often when things start getting really interesting in these neighbouring disciplines it’s because they are getting philosophical, whether or not this is recognized.

  Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Edward Harcourt.

• How To Win Arguments In The Post-Truth Era

  

  As French playwright Jean Giraudoux put it: “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.”

  Bruno Diaz gets all sincere about our bullshit era.

• Not That: reflections on the Election, Choicelessness and Contradiction

  

  Badiou is clear that the properly political contradiction is not between two forms of the same world, but between a world and something which is beyond the limits of that world. The true contradiction was between Trump and Sanders, Badiou says. In affirmation of real choice, he continues that “today, against Trump, we cannot desire Clinton. We must create a return to the true contradiction. That is, we must propose a political orientation that goes beyond the world as it is …”

  Cam Scott on Badiou on Trump.

• A Conversation on M.R. James

  

  Because of the writer that James was, his prose come across as very conversational. The criticism often suggested of him is that it’s rambling and dusty but I don’t think that myself. When you have to start breaking that down, fitting his text into boxes, there’s actually no fat on his writing at all. The aspects you might think of as extraneous are actually an important part of how these texts work; the everyday setting, the ordinary people venturing into extraordinary situations.

  Leah Moore and John Reppion in conversation with Adam Scovell.

• Fish Stocking

  

  The first weekend of January I walk in the park by my apartment and arrive at the smell of pines.
   
  By Tina Xiang.

• Excerpt: Vulgar Tongues

  

  Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) listed other slang names for prison which were in use at that time, such as the iron doublet, the sheriff’s hotel, lob’s pound, the boarding school, limbo, the repository and the spring-ankle warehouse. He also recorded that such a building was called a queer ken, and defined queer birds as ‘rogues relieved from prison, and returned to their old trade’, a usage which survived virtually intact into the 20th century, as in the classic 1936 London underworld novel The Gilt Kid by James Curtis.

  An excerpt from Max Décharné‘s alternative history of English slang.

• Crevices

  

  The fearful snail was bobbing its head and his carefully rolled hem reverted back to its own place with a sigh of relief when A smiled. She smiled like a foreign woman smiles to a man in a foreign country. The curious snail had shot a chitinous love dart towards his mate. But just like in the animal world, there was no organ to receive the dart.

  By Simina Neagu.