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Essays

A collection of 3 issues

Is it O.K to be a Luddite?

On Pynchon's question, forty-two years later In October 1984, Thomas Pynchon — already by then a writer who had withdrawn from public life so completely that some reviewers wondered if he was a hoax — published an essay in The New York Times Book Review asking what now reads

The Third Idiocy

on the kind of withdrawal Marx couldn't have seen Marx named two kinds of idiocy — and meant the word, in both cases, in its older Greek register. Idiotēs: the private one. The withdrawn. The person whose life happens away from the public arrangements that make a city a

The Social Individual Never Showed Up

Notes toward a Grundrisse for the rest of us In 1858, in a London apartment, a man with bad health and worse finances sat down to draft what would become his most important unfinished book. He called it nothing in particular. We call it the Grundrisse. Seven notebooks, written in