Joshua Landy's blog

Is there anyone else out there who wonders what’s going on with copy-editing?  Or should I say copyediting?

For a long time I used to go to bed with a book by Freud.

I was blithely aldaily-surfing the other day, minding my own business, when a review article in The Nation put an abrupt end to my happy cyber-foraging.

The President of SUNY Albany has just decided to close its programs in French, Italian, Classics, Russian, and Drama.  Here’s a great idea: let’s tell him he did the right thing!

My friend works in the world’s weirdest building.  It’s all made of grass, it has no walls or ceiling, and it’s full of people making financial transactions.

I can prove Paris belongs to me!  And that all fruits are bananas!  Follow me to find out how.

If you help your team win a match by deliberately breaking the rules, as Luis Suárez did last week, are you a hero or a cheat?  I think a cheat, but let me say why.

René Girard is famous for claiming that there is no such thing as spontaneous desire: we don’t fall for people because they are beautiful or smart or funny or kind; we fall for them because somebody else fell for them first.  This all sounds extremely exciting, in that very French kind of way.  But does anyone actually believe it?   

I like literary history as much as the next person.  It’s just that mine is made up of human beings, not logs.

In a series of inspiring posts, Cécile Alduy has been putting forward an argument against narrativity.