Fyodor, Flannery, and GoodFellas Reveal Something Ironic about Our Modern World
Essences become meaningless in both a perfect and marred world.
Dostoyevsky
How to Use the Cold Weather
I woke up yesterday morning to the gales of November, the same that brought down the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, according to meteorologists who said the atmospheric mix that dumped a few inches on my town is the same that brought down the mighty freighter.
I could hear a collective
Pixel v. Print and Five Hard Novels
I ran across perhaps the most-enjoyable Medium.com pieces of the past few months: Five Insanely Difficult Novels (and Why They're Worth the Effort).
It, for me, is perhaps the quintessential online essay.
I agree with Joseph Epstein that there is something fundamentally different between reading print and
How to Survive the Atheistic Hurricane
Raskolnikov to the Demons, with the Underground Man topping it off.
Dostoyevsky's Possessed in Modern Day America
"Peter Verkhovensky meet John Styn. John, Peter is the descendant of godless liberal enlightenment thinkers who now wants violence and revolution. Peter, John is the descendant of an ex-Baptist minister who likes to hug a lot."
That's what went through my mind a few years ago
Dostoyevsky's Mock Execution
In 1849, political radicals were taken out of their jail to be executed. They were lined up in front of the firing squad. Right before the guns were fired, a courier galloped up with an imperial decree, commuting the death sentence to a term in prison camp.
The whole thing
Alyosha Karamazov
There were four Karamazov brothers: Dmitri, the sensualist–loving God but indulging his sins; Ivan, the intellectual–unable to believe in a good God; Smerdyakov, the twisted and cunning bastard son–and parricide; Alyosha, the monk and budding saint–a handsome young man who loves God and humanity.
Few literary