“How do those who profess themselves to be abstract thinkers experience emotions, the body, and touch?” philosopher François Noudelmann asks in The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano. In this lyrical essay on philosophy and music-making, Noudelmann contends that the piano provides another kind of “voice” for a philosopher, one that channels different rhythms and tones than those we hear in their writing and speech. And in understanding their music, we have a different means of understanding their philosophical outlooks. Drawing heavily on the philosophical discipline

When a newspaper reports that a liberal arts college somewhere is teaching a seminar on the hermeneutics of Lady Gaga, do we feel outrage, relief, or both? As the philosophical treatment of pop culture gains currency, it's easy to be tempted by contradictory reactions: We long for a serious consideration of the seemingly frivolous, yes, but also for the deflation of academic self-seriousness. Inception and Philosophy is the latest entry in Blackwell’s Philosophy and Pop Culture series (previous titles have included The Daily Show and Philosophy and Mad Men and Philosophy, among many more),

In 1941 the American journalist Dorothy Thompson published an essay called ‘Who Goes Nazi?’ She proposed ‘an interesting and somewhat macabre parlour game’ to be played at dinner parties. The concept is in the name: look around the room and everybody swings one way or the other. She runs through various guests: the sportsman bank vice-president (Nazi); the threadbare editor (not a Nazi); the scientist’s masochist wife (Nazi); the chauffeur’s grandson serving drinks (not a Nazi); the Jewish speculator who doesn’t like Jews (Nazi); the quiet Jewish man from the South (not a Nazi). In Thompson’s

John Leonard wrote four novels, although, as he put it, “the public has a way of letting you know that it will pay more for you to discover and to celebrate excellence in other people, and rather less for your own refined feelings.” He was, in other words, better known as a critic than as a novelist, but his lavish, quicksilver reviews are great precisely because they are infused with those refined feelings. Leonard wrote for numerous publications, including The Nation, Harper’s, and The Atlantic, and appeared on NPR and CBS’s Sunday Morning. He was the editor of the New York Times Book Review

While spending several weeks reading and writing about Michel Houellebecq, a loose thought kept rattling around in my mind. In American novels, we have a tacit set of conventions for writing about romantic losers. Houellebecq squarely violates them. This is one reason that The Elementary Particles (2000), his first novel published in the US, seemed (to some) so exciting and revelatory or (to others) completely repellent. We American readers immediately notice that he is covering familiar territory, but in a crucially different way from our own youngish novelists.

In 1982, Mississippi senator John Stennis was chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Stennis was a senator of the old school—literally. When he retired in 1989, after forty-one years, he was the chamber’s most senior member, and the second-longest-serving member in the Senate’s history. And so he did things a little differently than we’re used to today. Asked by a colleague to hold a fund-raiser with defense contractors, Stennis recoiled. “Would that be proper?” he asked. “I hold life and death over those companies. I don’t think it would be proper for me to take money from them.”

Andrew Breitbart, Web entrepreneur and conservative propagandist, died on Wednesday night, apparently of natural causes, in Los Angeles. His death was unexpected, and the response to its announcement this morning was an odd and probably appropriate mixture of shock and suspicion. He was hugely influential in the creation and evolution of the political Internet, though he was only a national celebrity in his own right for a couple years.