V.S. Naipaul and the Impossibility of Going Home
A brilliant writer, a misogynist, a small-town boy with a haughty, big-city gaze: Naipaul’s life was marked by a sense of doubleness.
A brilliant writer, a misogynist, a small-town boy with a haughty, big-city gaze: Naipaul’s life was marked by a sense of doubleness.
Oxford’s Dr. Anders Sandberg is using his whiteboard to calculate the world’s existential risks.
On the way fortune-telling has served both to reify and subvert the logic of capitalist economics.
On what is lost when we spend our lives trying to avoid feeling alone.
What happens to the mind when the body looks its best?
Why is art with themes and readily available meanings so often privileged above pure aesthetic beauty?
Chris Reynolds Gordon was a multimillionaire before losing it all and slipping into prostitution. Now he’s on a mission to win it all back.
It used to be you couldn’t throw a stick in an Oxford quadrangle without hitting a posh, white, Eton-prepped, young man. These days though, you’re just as likely to hit a middle-class girl from Nottingham, sleep-deprived and lugging a backpack, on her way to economics class. It’s clear that modern Americans love the idea of British royalty. From a national obsession with Downton Abbey to a desire for those “oh so lovely accents,” the aristocratic days sure seem dandy to us; and yet, this kind of aristocracy has all but disappeared. Oxford, Cambridge, and Eton each have “Diversity” webpages and their once-impossible-to-penetrate wrought iron gates have been flung open to anyone from any social class from any country. Prestigious, $100,000-per-year boarding schools like Le Rosey have finally begun to dole out hefty scholarships. Hunting outings are now team-building corporate events. A ski trip in the Alps isn’t all that unusual for the upper-middle-class student studying abroad in Europe. (In fact, she probably also goes sailing in the West Indies with her consultant/corporate lawyer/oil maven father during …