When you went to a traveling American circus in the nineteenth century, you got scammed. Pay for the freak show, and you'd sometimes be offered the chance, for a bit more money, to see the "Feejee Mermaid." A real life mermaid! How could you pass this up? You'd pay, walk past the illustrations of some creature out of Hans Christian Andersen, and be greeted by the torso, arms and head of a monkey stitched to the body of a fish. It was compelling taxidermy, but not quite what you paid for.

in print

Feb/Mar 2011 Contents

Omnivore

Debates in political philosophy

Jeremy Waldron (NYU): The Principle of Proximity. Corey L. Brettschneider (Brown): The Value Theory of Democracy. Scott Anderson (UBC): The Enforcement Approach to Coercion. You can download the book Normative Interests and Chosen Obligations by David Owens. The introduction to Liberalism without Perfection by Jonathan Quong. The first chapter from The Real World of Democratic Theory by Ian Shapiro. What is a good life? An excerpt from Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin. From the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies, a symposium on Will Kymlicka’s book Multicultural Odysseys; and a symposium on Adrian Vermeule’s Law and the Limits of Reason. The first chapter from Michael Oakeshott's Skepticism by Aryeh Botwinick. What we owe the audacious

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Paper Trail

Jan 31 2011

We’ve just heard that Sheila Heti’s second novel, How Should A Person Be?, has been sold to Henry Holt for publication in summer 2012. We’ve been praising the book since the day we scored a copy from Toronto’s House of Anansi Press this fall, and were puzzled by the seeming lack of stateside interest in publishing it. One Observer article, an excerpt in n+1, and some proclamations of Heti’s talent from

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outposts

literary events

Jan 31 2011

syllabi

Jul 21 2009

Daniel Pearce: Postcollege Ennui

Cover of Mary McCarthy's The Group
(Penguin Books, 1968)

College has proved so reliable a setting for fiction that it’s even laid claim to its own literary genre. But what happens after the campus novel graduates? The transition out of college is a much sadder, much less circumscribed, and, despite classic treatments by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary McCarthy, much less popular novelistic subject than college itself. The following books tackle (or, in The

The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan …

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal …

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