Frau Rahner changed her tune when Erich Weiss morphed into Harry Houdini, who called himself—with good reason—vaudeville’s premiere escape artist. That was only the beginning.

How is the West to confront the self-destructive cultural malaise of which Blair rightly warns if he can define the West only as a set of political and economic arrangements agreed to on essentially utilitarian grounds?

Yet for one highly cultural and literary scientist, the task of defining love and its probable brain correlates are by no means uncomplicated, reductive tasks.

They were trying to reassure themselves that there were no enemy batteries spying on them from the next hill and no German bombing planes approaching to blast them out of existence. They talked in low tones. They were nervous.

Tallmadge had electrified the proceedings by introducing a controversial proposal: statehood should only be granted, he insisted, if the further importation of slaves was prohibited.

You can’t be a poet and be completely bourgeois; you’re basically leading this insane life, that is, you’re spending your energies creating objects that have no value in the bourgeois world. It can hardly be called bourgeois.