Someone’s Sending Feces to Philosophers, and Other News

Full of shit.

• There are plenty of people in this world who deserve to find an envelope full of human feces in the mail. Philosophers, in my experience, are not among these people—the life of the mind does not often cry out for comeuppance. But someone thinks otherwise. Sally Haslanger, a professor at MIT, was among four philosophers to receive shit in the mail last summer: “Haslanger wasn’t as confounded as one might expect a well-respected philosopher to be when faced with a mysterious package of poop. That’s because three other philosophers also received shit in the mail last summer … All four philosophy professors were embroiled in a 2014 academic brawl over what they perceived as an abuse of power within their field. Now, they say someone is sending them shit in an attempt to shut them up. The question is, who? And why now?”

• Let’s take a trip to the annals of ghostwriting, where new research suggests that Hitler actually wrote Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, a 1923 book previously believed to be the work of Baron Adolf Victor von Koerber. “I’m convinced from the presented sources that Hitler himself wrote this short text or gave at least the basic information to an editor,” a German newspaper editor said. “This is important because it shows that Hitler thought about himself as the ‘German savior’ as early as 1923. So I think this is a small but important advance in researching Hitler’s biography.” 

• Chris Ware revisits Hariton Pushwagner’s opus Soft City, a trippy graphic novel that broke so decisively with late-sixties art-world norms that no one bothered to pay attention to it: “It is a miracle of its native medium—the comic strip—for its startling and disquieting vision in a form that had never before quite seen anything like it. Funny, or maybe not so funny, that it would take forty years for the rest of the world to realize it … its tone feels dire and experimental; it wows visually but gets under one’s skin in an unfamiliar, uncompanionable manner, introducing the awkward revelations of 1960s experimental film, writing, and poetry to a medium at that point more popularly associated with superheroes.”

• Poor Ben Jonson. Of the Elizabethan English playwrights, he’s long ranked a distant third, trailing Christopher Marlowe and of course Shakespeare (whose enduring success Jonson predicted). But Ed Simon argues that Jonson’s plays still belong on the stage: “Jonson was the great showstopper of the age, revolutionizing the theater every bit as much as the others, writing in every major genre from domestic and revenge tragedy to city comedy, and penning verse that despite its deceptive simplicity is among the most moving of that age. Moreover, while Shakespeare is in some sense a cipher onto which a variety of positions and opinions can be projected, Jonson in his imperfections can seem more real. Shakespeare may have been for all time, but Jonson was so of his own age that he remains more tangible as a personality.”

• New York’s public libraries were once powered by coal, so someone had to stay on the premises to keep the fires lit. That means, yes, there are apartments in city libraries—in another time, you could live at the library. Today, only thirteen of the apartments remain. Sarah Laskow visited one of them: “In today's New York real estate market, this apartment is not unappealing. Yes, it would need cleaning and modernizing before anyone moved in. The one toilet in the apartment is facing into a corner. But the rooms are large enough, the kitchen could fit multiple people, and it's in a library. Finding this much empty space anywhere in Manhattan is a rarity; walking upstairs in a well-used building and finding an empty floor feels like being in on a great secret.”

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