Reviews and News:

The case for universal basic income.

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David Orr on Dylan and poetry: "Yes, song lyrics look like poems if you print them on a page. But they're very rarely printed on a page, at least for the purpose of being read as poems. Mostly they're printed so that people can figure out what Eddie Vedder is saying in "Yellow Ledbetter." And for that matter, screenplays and theatrical plays resemble each other more closely than do songs and poems, but that has yet to result in Quentin Tarantino winning the Pulitzer in drama. As for the ancient Greeks, well, the fact that a group of people thought about something a certain way nearly three millenniums ago doesn't seem like a compelling argument for thinking the same way today. (The ancient Greeks also sacrificed animals to their gods — maybe the Swedish Academy should dispatch a few reindeer, and see if that produces a laureate willing to show up for the ceremony next time around?) Then there is the music. A well-written song isn't just a poem with a bunch of notes attached; it's a unity of verbal and musical elements."

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Lenin's literature.

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How golden was the Golden Age of America's economy?

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In Case You Missed It:

The demise of language and rise of cloning: "On both sides of the Atlantic, human cloning for pregnancy has been stealthily gaining ground in the last few years, in part due to cultural perceptions and words that obscure reality."

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Stephen C Angle writes in defense of hierarchy

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Inequality and democracy. The existence of the first does not mark the end of the second.

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Boyd Tonkin makes the case for reading John Milton today

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Interview: Sam Leith talks to Erica Benner about Machiavelli

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Classic Essay: Irving Howe, "The Culture of Modernism"

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