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A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel. Right? So it's interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. Right? Not only am I right, but in any piece of writing there's a tertiary argument: why should you spend …

[...] you don't get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in the text until you start trying to reproduce them. [...]

Grown-ups buy line-caught salmon, they don’t read Dialectic of Enlightenment. History has stopped and we live, don’t we, in the best of all possible worlds? In that best of all possible worlds, at the end of history, wrote Fredric Jameson in Late Marxism (1990), ‘the question about poetry after Aus…

[...] When Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcuse arranged to meet at the Coupole in Paris in the late 1960s, Sartre worried how he could get through lunch without revealing the truth. ‘I have never read a word Marcuse has written’, he told his future biographer John Gerassi. ‘I know he has tried to link Mar…

Frankfurt School critical theory was not supposed to be like this. Critical theory had something built into it akin to the Jewish taboo on calling God by his name: to do so would be premature since we are not yet in the messianic age. Similarly for critical theory, setting out a utopian vision woul…