culture June/July/Aug 2016

Last Things

“To philosophize,” said Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century, “is to learn to die.” And philosophize about death he did—as often as Seneca, his intellectual ancestor in the first century. Both the “French Seneca,” as Montaigne is sometimes called, and the Roman original believed in the paramedical responsibility of thinkers. They contended, as Seneca said in his famous letters to a young man named Lucilius, that “what philosophy holds out to humanity” is not intellectual acrobatics but “counsel”—“good advice” on life and death.

“What’s the point of concocting whimsies?” Seneca railed

culture October 11, 2013

Let’s Shut Up About Sex

Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is called “Let’s Read About Sex,” and apparently it’s caused a small stir. We live at a moment where most lovers would be more ashamed to let on that their sex-style was (gasp!) “vanilla” than that it broke a couple of teeth. Married people are far more likely to feel guilty for not having enough sex than for having too much. “Regular sex is a part of every healthy life-style!” we are told everywhere, often in the same pages that we’re told to eat our vegetables.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is called “Let’s Read About Sex,” and apparently it’s caused a small stir. This is ironic because we’re at a stage in literary debate where the most original thing we could do with sex just might be to shut up about it.

We live at a moment where most lovers would be more ashamed to let on that their sex-style was (gasp!) “vanilla” than that it broke a couple of teeth. Married people are far more likely to feel guilty for not having enough sex than for having too much. “Regular sex is a part of every healthy life-style!” we are told everywhere, often in

culture June/July/Aug 2013

Lust Never Sleeps

Once in a while a book appears that’s so bad you want it to be a satire. If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudopoetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking “dirty talk,” you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell.

One wishes that Katherine Angel, a historian of female sexual dysfunction at Warwick University, had, in fact, found this tale a little more “difficult to tell.” But Angel can’t stop telling and writing about herself—or about herself

Cristina Nehring