Havel’s Specter: On Václav Havel

Exploring the life and work of the Czech playwright, politician and philosopher:

“‘I approach philosophy somewhat the way we approach art,’ Havel once confessed. Despite his lack of method, he took a reading of Heidegger and a handful of homegrown metaphors and set forth in his writing powerful ideas about politics, truth and human nature. Havel believed that under communism and capitalism, people are threatened by what he described in his 1984 essay ‘Politics and Conscience’ as ‘the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.’ He coined a word for this power, samopohyb, which his graceful and sensitive longtime translator, Paul Wilson, believes is derived from samopohybný (‘self-propelled’). Wilson has rendered the word variously as ‘self-momentum’ and ‘automatism.'”

Source: The Nation
Published: Mar 23, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,789 words)

It Happened One Decade

What the Great Depression did to culture.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 21, 2009
Length: 15 minutes (3,860 words)

Bootylicious

What do the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 7, 2009
Length: 16 minutes (4,244 words)