Author Interviews

Shivers Down Your Spine

"We get 'shivers down our spine' because there’s a disjunct between what we see and feel and what we know is happening to us. Giant panoramic paintings ... can take your breath way not only because you feel as if you’ve suddenly walked into the world of the paintings (you are enveloped by it), but because it’s an embodied experience which can give you shivers, tears, and sometimes vertigo or nausea. It’s that jaw-dropping sense of awe, reverence, and perhaps a little fear that makes the comparison to the horror film fitting."

Read more from the interview with Alison Griffiths...

Animals as Persons

"Our thinking about animals is very confused. On one hand, we claim to regard animals as members of the moral community. We claim to embrace a moral and legal obligation not to inflict “unnecessary” suffering or death on animals. We can, of course, debate the meaning of “necessity,” but whatever it means, it must rule out suffering and death imposed for reasons of human pleasure, amusement, or convenience. If it does not do so, then the exception would completely swallow the moral rule."

Read more from the interview with Gary Francione...

Kitchen Mysteries

Read an interview with Hervé This from the Toronto Globe and Mail.

The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy

"A study on Tugendhat is necessary ... because it demonstrates that the analytical/continental division does not condition philosophy anymore. "

Read more from the interview with Santiago Zabala.

There a Petal Silently Falls

"One needs a unique language and form to depict a changing world, and in this sense a work's world-view creates its own form. I prefer to describe this process not as an experiment but as the pursuit of a different factuality. If you're going to change the world, how are you going to do it through conventional methods and language?"

Read more from the interview with Ch'oe Yun.

When Principles Pay

Read an interview with Geoffrey Heal from Ideas at Work.

In Love and Struggle

"Feminist correspondences since the 1970s reveal changes in gender roles and self-perception in quite an extraordinary way. Though few have remarked upon the stories hidden in this humble form of life writing, letters can tell us the relationship histories of a generation at the forefront of social change."

Read more from the interview with Margaretta Jolly.

Klezmer America

Q: But even Madonna is into Kaballah!

JF: Exactly, which is to say that maybe the process that the book has been treating, the klezmering of America—the tendency for Jewish themes, materials, and imaginative production to supply a model for new ethnic dispensation across the board—has been going on deeper and more intensely than I reckoned when I started the book....

Read more from the interview with Jonathan Freedman.

Tattooing the World

"In the 1830s O'Connell acquired a full-body tattoo in Pohnpei, where he married and became a member of the community. But in New York, where he gained fame as the first man to display his tattoos, women and children ran screaming from him. Ministers had warned from the pulpit that viewing the designs would transfer them to any woman's unborn child." Read more from the interview with Juniper Ellis...

Wars of Position

Listen to an interview with Timothy Brennan on "Against the Grain."