Magnificent Octopus

Orson Welles reads Kafka. "Every man strives to attain the law."

"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme s...

The Letter Killers Club , by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, is a strange little excuse for a novel. I want to love it, but I don't quite. F...

Last week I went to see Man Booker International Prize-nominated author and creative writing professor Josip Novakovich and two-time Booker ...

We are living in 1937 and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our...

"You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann) as a wildly overgrown tree that — for two hundred years straight — had stif...

I love art. As the saying goes, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Often I feel that I don't have the vocabulary t...

The work of André Dubois is being featured as part of Art Souterrain 2014 , showcasing art in the public spaces of Montreal's undergrou...

I've only ever read Stefan Zweig's Chess Story , but there is so much more. Wes Anderson "It’s more like me trying to do a ...

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. I've heard this phrase thousands of times, often with a hint of humour, referring to v...

A while ago I attended an exhibit exploring the work of David Cronenberg . That visit included a tour of BMC Labs , after which I engaged in...

How to read... a mind is a two-week online course starting March 17, offered by the University of Nottingham. The journey from new studen...

My assistant's favourite poem remains a secret, but I maintain that it's not an inappropriate discussion to have. To the contrary, I...

"Or take our situation, for instance, why do you say it isn't a manifestation of a supercivilization?" "Hmm, too human....

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics — book by Norton Juster, adapted into animated short by Chuck Jones. (Via Brain Pic...

Malianov's wife is away, and a friend of hers comes to stay: ...then he poured her another glass of wine. The decision to toast the use...

The experience of Mikhail Bulgakov's short story Morphine is exquisite and hallucinatory, but its meaning is a little elusive. On the...

It's a futuristic mystery dystopian sci-fi action-adventure romance. More or less. Archetype , by M.D. Waters, is a terrifically engro...

Clever people have been pointing out for a long time that happiness is like good health: when it's there, you don't notice it. But w...

"Tango?" said Mrs Rupa Mehra in alarm. "What is tango?" "Bye, Ma," said Meenakshi. "Tango. A dance. We...