Pardon His French
February 6, 2025 | Jim Angehr
A long term reading project of mine is Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, an early 19th Century work by an Italian polymath that finds the author writing about whatever he wants to write about for thousands of pages. Basically, it was Bread and...
Finitude As A Good
January 30, 2025 | Jim Angehr
Just because people say it all the time doesn’t make it true. Case in point: “You can be anything you want!” You wouldn’t bat an eyelash if you heard someone exclaim that. But it’s not true, or at least...
Anchored in the Future
January 23, 2025 | Jim Angehr
One of my favorite recent books is Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men. It’s a book about the importance of books, the importance of memory, the travails of national identity and immigration, the horrors of war...
When It's Worse Than You Think
January 16, 2025 | Jim Angehr
The twentieth century was getting Frenchy with it as multiple authors identified the modern malaise that we often feel as anomie. It’s that hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it, low level buzzing, dull ache of dissatisfaction and ache that...
Freedom, Love, Gatsby
January 9, 2025 | Jim Angehr
Flying back from a jaunt to old Germany, I enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 movie riff, The Great Gatsby. Not a perfect film, but no adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel could ever be. (Editor's note: The lukewarm critical response was not...