May

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking right now and how writers are trying to keep up. Here are some routes we found in April that opened up new vistas on what it means to be modern and how became we that way.

April

Each month we keep track of the differing paths modern life is taking right now and how writers are trying to keep up. Here are some routes we found that opened up new vistas on being modern and how we got that way.

Tim Barr’s links for February

Tim Barr’s links for January.

Tim Barr’s links for December.

Tim Barr’s links for November.

Tim Barr’s links for October.

Tim Barr’s links for September.

Tim Barr’s links for August

Tim Barr’s links for July

Last week concluded an excellent and stimulating third Genealogies of Modernity Seminar.

“If ‘modernity,’ for example is an egalitarian project, we can say that, to a certain extent, we have started to become modern. But, the increased accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small segment of the world’s population and the shrinking of the middle class would seem to testify that the ‘modern’ project has stopped or even reversed.”

“The decline of academic humanities does not necessarily mean the end of the humanities. It could mean this (and thus the withering of humanity), it could also mean a new way forward. Humans are marked—as Hannah Arendt identified—by natality, the truth of birth and new initiatives.”

“The site’s logo of a tower is an emblem of modernity haunted by genesis. But as both the myth of Babel and the image of the gene remind us, the origin is not at the beginning, but in the middle.”

“The project recognizes that the stories we tell ourselves about the passage to modernity are many and often conflicting even within one discipline.”