Raritania

Considering the question that is the title of this post I think it worth starting with a bit of background ( covered before in some degree ,...

One of the great hypocrisies of art criticism is the sneer at art for being "political." After all, in treating any subject--or ...

Some time ago I came across Keith Pille's analysis of Tom Clancy's novels . The approach he takes differs greatly from mine. Where...

Recently writing about "the mood of the 1990s" it was completely unironic that the matter of irony came up in my research, and my...

In answer to the question that is the title of this post, "No." It may well be that others are handing over the job of generatin...

Recently revisiting the theorizing about the "information age" of Alvin Toffler and others I have mainly focused on what has not ...

The question of whether "fan fiction" is in decline has at this stage of things been debated for decades. It has long seemed to ...

Where the right to a position or some other such good is concerned people often speak of having "paid their dues." One might tak...

As I have remarked in the past on this blog (and elsewhere), blogging seems to me an activity in decline as the way in which people use the ...

I have personally been on both sides of the peer review process, in more than one field. I thus know something of not just its virtues but i...

These days we are hearing quite a bit about the turmoil within academic publishing--the explosion of dubious journals, the article processin...

I have never cared for the use of the term "NIMBY" (an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard"), which is typically as a sneer...

The word "pundit" is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word "pandita" meaning "learned." Today, however, ...

It is notorious that fiction, not least that fiction produced by Hollywood, rarely depicts work in a convincing way, even when the depictio...

In Lost Illusions Balzac remarks that "there are lives in which chance plays no part"--such that those "despair[ing] of a li...