Author Archives: pfannkuchea

Recently, The New York Times ran one of those insipid “Ask the Celebrities” features by asking, “What will later generations find most objectionable about the culture of the early 2020s?” Most of the responses misconstrued the question by pointing to things that have been around for a very long time (“eating dead animals”). But aContinue reading “Selfies and Cancel Culture: The Political Economy of Self-Esteem”

David Brooks recently published an editorial on the death by suicide of his best friend, a highly intelligent man of outstanding accomplishment with a loving family and devoted friends. As in most discussions of depression, the article does not question the medical interpretation of his friends’s condition, though the friend received the best possible medicalContinue reading “Leo Tolstoy and the Forgotten Sources of Depression”

I want to recommend a French author I’ve become addicted to (though I don’t find his person always very sympathetic): Emmanuel Carrère. I mentioned before that he’s been called the French Knausgaard, though admittedly that’s not necessarily a high recommendation in my opinion.  I would be curious what any survivor of a mental crisis orContinue reading “Freedom and Suicide”

I perceive contemporary social relationships as afflicted by an invisible epidemic of hypersensitivity and avoidance. As for me, I am a mild-mannered older man who never intends to give offense. Nevertheless, since the pandemic began I have succeeded in offending two longstanding friends to such a degree that they broke off contact with me andContinue reading “Who Else Has Been Ghosted Lately?”

During my graduate study and career, I disliked the cult status of French critical theory in American English departments. This began after the 1960s and lasted until around the turn of the century. I had come of age at a time when Marx, Hegel, Sartre, and Lukács still set the tone. I was convinced thatContinue reading “What Makes French “Critical Theory” so Distinct?”

An historian friend smugly assures me that professional historians have not neglected the years 1917-20, which saw American participation in the war in Europe and repression at home. That is no doubt true, but what distinguishes American Midnight from all the discussions of its various sub-histories is its insistence that the seemingly separate strands ofContinue reading “American Midnight and my Personal Reflections on our Heart of Darkness”

The New York Times this morning (Dec. 15, 2022) carried an article about the unbearable pressure caused by the overwhelming and rising number of immigrants crossing the border into the relatively welcoming city of El Paso, Texas. Demonized by conservatives, ignored as much as possible by the Democrats whose program offers no solution, the acceleratingContinue reading “The Immigrant Flood as “Event””

We tend to see political correctness and “cancel culture” through the jaundiced eyes of right-wing commentators. A closer look at two cases reveals the degree to which our own authoritarianism has succeeded in sanctioning what is blatantly racist and, conversely, in imposing upon one of the most effective denunciations of racism and imperialism a proscriptionContinue reading “Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul: politically correct or piously racist?”

We have a fondness for the metaphor of a world turned upside down. It is a preferred metaphor of history writing and history-making. Successful revolutions are said “to turn the world upside down.” Marx supposedly turned Hegel’s dialectic upside down (or right side up depending on how one sees it). We need a new metaphorContinue reading “A World Turned Inside Out”