http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/nyregion/jeremy-wilson-a-compulsive-con-man.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090284)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090302)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090304)

In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics. Whether you’re a fan of Barthes, Foucault, de Man, and Derrida or not, you at least have to credit them with this fertile miscegenation of criticism and philosophy: critical theory is now a bona fide area of study for young American philosophers interested in both Continental poetics and Anglo-American analytic practice. H. L. Hix is one of these young (judging by his author photo, about twelve) U.S. philosophers, and I’m pretty sure that his 1992 Morte d’ Author: An Autopsy is a Ph.D. dissertation that was more than good enough to see print as part of Temple University Press’s “The Arts and Their Philosophies” series.

One of the wickedly fun things about following literary theory in the 1990s is going to be watching young critics/philosophers now come along and attack their poststructuralist teachers by criticizing assumptions those teachers have held as self-evident. This is just what Professor Hix is doing with one of the true clarion-calls that marked the shift from New Criticism and structuralism to deconstruction, Roland Barthes’ 1968 announcement of “The Death of the Author.” Barthes’ seminal essay has prompted twenty-three years of vigorous interjournal debate among European theorists (pro-death) and U.S. philosophers (anti-death, mostly), a debate that Hix has impressively compiled and arranged between two covers, and a debate that he has, rather less impressively, sought to resolve by accusing all parties of not being nearly complicated enough in their understanding of the term “author” ’s in- and extensions.

If you’re not a critical-theory jockey, then to appreciate why the metaphysical viability of the author is a big deal you have to recognize the difference between a writer—the person whose choices and actions account for a text’s features—and an author—the entity whose intentions are taken to be responsible for a text’s meaning. Hix, paraphrasing the ever-limpid Alexander Nehamas, uses the old saw about monkeys and typewriters to illustrate the distinction: “It is surely possible, though obviously unlikely, that a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters could by sheer chance produce an encyclopedia. If they did, they would be able to account for all the features of the text: Everything in the text was put there . . . by monkeys at Smith-Coronas. But . . . there would be no way to account for the meaning of the text’s features, because . . . the monkeys could not have meant anything by their typing.” Authors are monkeys who mean.

And for Romantic and early-twentieth-century critics, textual interpretation was author-based. For Wordsworth, the critic regards a text as the creative instantiation of a writer’s very self. Rather more clinically, I. A. Richards saw criticism as all and only an effort to nail down the “relevant mental condition” of a text’s creator. Axiomatic for both schools was the idea of a real author, an entity for whose definition most critics credit Hobbes’s Leviathan, which describes real authors as persons who, first, accept responsibility for a text and, second, “own” that text, i.e. retain the right to determine its meaning. It’s just this definition of “author” that Barthes in ’68 was trying to refute, arguing with respect to the first criterion that a writer cannot determine his text’s consequences enough to be really responsible (Salinger wasn’t hauled into court as an accessory when John Lennon was shot), and with respect to the second that the writer’s not the text’s owner in Hobbes’s sense because it is really critical readers who decide and thus determine what a piece of writing means.

It’s Barthes’ second argument here that’s the real poststructural death certificate, and this line is really just an involution of the New Critics’ WWII-era reaction against Richards and the Romantics. The New Critics, rather level-headedly at first, sought to dethrone the author by attacking what they called “the Intentional Fallacy.” Writers are sometimes wrong about what their texts mean, or sometimes have no idea what they really mean. Sometimes the text’s meaning even changes for the writer. It doesn’t matter what the writer means, basically, for the New Critics; it matters only what the text says. This critical overthrow of creative intent set the stage for the poststructural show that opened a couple decades later. The deconstructionists (“deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” mean the same thing, by the way: “poststructuralist” is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn’t want to be called a deconstructionist), explicitly following Husserl and Brentano and Heidegger the same way the New Critics had co-opted Hegel, see the debate over the ownership of meaning as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There’s been this longstanding deluded presumption, they think, that if there is an utterance then there must exist a unified, efficacious presence that causes and owns that utterance. The poststructuralists attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favor of presence over absence and speech over writing. We tend to trust speech over writing because of the immediacy of the speaker: he’s right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the reason why the poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at all is that they see writing, not speech, as more faithful to the metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.

For the deconstructionist, then, a writer’s circumstances and intentions are indeed a part of the “context” of a text, but context imposes no real cinctures on the text’s meaning, because meaning in language requires a cultivation of absence rather than presence, involves not the imposition but the erasure of consciousness. This is so because these guys—Derrida following Heidegger and Barthes Mallarmé and Foucault God knows who—see literary language as not a tool but an environment. A writer does not wield language; he is subsumed in it. Language speaks us; writing writes; etc. Hix makes little mention of Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought or Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy, where all this stuff is set out most clearly, but he does quote enough Barthes—“To write is . . . to reach that point where only language acts, performs,’ and not me’”—so you get the idea that author-as-owner is not just superfluous but contradictory, and enough Foucault—“The writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’; [it is] an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier”—so you can see that even the New Critics’ Holy Text disappears as the unitary lodestone of meaning and value. For Hix’s teachers, trying to attribute writing’s meaning to a static text or a human author is like trying to knit your own body, your own needles. Hix has an even better sartorial image: “Previously, the text was a cloth to be unraveled by the reader; if the cloth were unwound all the way, the reader would find the author holding the other end. But Barthes makes the text a shroud, and no one, not even a corpse, is holding the other end.”

Hix himself is a good weaver; Morte d’Author is a tight piece of work. Its first half is a critical overview of some of the major positions on authorial vital signs. Not only is there Hobbes and Frye on what an author is, there’s Foucault v. Nehamas on just how to recognize what an author is, and Barthes v. William Gass on whether to even bother trying to find an author. There are also brief critical summaries of Derrida, Culler, Stecker, Booth, and Burke. Hix’s discussion isn’t comprehensive, quite: Heidegger and Hegel are scarcely mentioned, Husserl (a major influence on Derrida) is absent, as are such important contemporary figures in the debate as Stanley Cavell (whose Must We Mean What We Say? is at least as important to Hix’s subject as Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction), Paul de Man, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. And Hix’s analysis of the players he does cover suffers from the scholarly anality that’s so common to published dissertations, an obsession with the jots and tittles of making excruciatingly clear what he’s saying and where he’s going. Wearying t-crossings like “I will isolate three of his claims in particular, disagreeing with two of them and agreeing with the other,” and microprecise critiques like “Wimsatt and Beardsley’s error may be hidden behind the passive voice; Cain’s is hidden behind the present tense” make the reader wish Hix’s editor had helped him delete gestures that seem directed at thesis committees rather than paying customers.

Hix’s obsessive attention to detail is perhaps justified, though, by the fact that Morte d’ Author aims to be more than just a compendium of views on the dead-author controversy. Hix promulgates his own theory of authorship, one that he claims clears up the debate and lays the foundation for a more sophisticated approach to literary criticism in the wake of deconstructionism’s plumeocide. Though his solution to the problem isn’t the universal solvent he leads the reader to expect, his project is still a neat example of that modern commissure where Continental theory and analytic practice fuse. What Hix offers as a resolution to the debate is a combination of a Derridean metaphysics that rejects assumptions of unified causal presence and a Wittgensteinian analytic method of treating actual habits of discourse as a touchstone for figuring out what certain terms really mean and do.

Hix, early in his summary of modern theories about the author, divides the extant views into two opposed camps. The anti-death guys still see the author as the “origin” / “cause” of a text, and the pro-death guys see the author as the “function” / “effect” of a text. Hix posits that both sides of the debate “mistake… one aspect of the author for the whole.” All the debaters have oversimplified what “author” really means. They’ve done this because they’ve made what Hix calls “the assumption of homogeneity,” simplistically regarding “author” as referring to “a unitary entity or phenomenon.” If we examine the way “author” is really used in critical discourse, Hix argues, we are forced to see the word’s denotation as really a complex interaction of the activities of the “historical writer” (the guy with the pencil), that writer’s influences and circumstances, the narrative persona adopted in a text, the extant text itself, the critical atmosphere that surrounds and informs the interpretation of the text, the individual reader’s actual interpretations of the text, and even the beliefs and actions consequent to that interpretation. In other words, the entire post-1968 squabble has been pointless, because the theorists involved haven’t bothered to consider what “author” truly means and embraces before they set about interring or resuscitating the patient.

The wicked fun here is to watch how Hix uses the deconstructionists’ own instruments against them. Derrida’s attack on the presumption of metaphysical presence in literary expression forms Hix’s blueprint for attacking the assumption of homogeneity, and Hix’s attempt to “undermine” and “overturn” an essentially binary opposition of author-as-cause v. author-as-effect is a textbook poststructural move. What’s more original and more interesting is Hix’s use of a kind of Austin/Wittgenstein ordinary-language analysis on the extension of the predicate “author.” Instead of joining his teachers in the metaphysical stratosphere they zoom around in, Hix quite plausibly suggests that we examine how smart readers really do use the term “author” in various kinds of critical discourse in order to figure out what the nature of the beast is before we whip out the spade or the de-fib paddles. His project, as he outlines it, seems both sensible and fun to watch.

Hix’s actual analysis of authority is way less sensible and way way less fun. For one thing, his actual argumentation is wildly uneven. In the same breath, he’ll recommend identification as necessary for determining viability, then say that a thorough definition of “author” is prima facie important because no satisfactory theory of text and reading is possible until there’s a solid theory of the author, which begs the poststructuralists whole question of whether a text even requires an author in order to be and to mean. Hix clearly does think a text requires an author, and so what pretends to be a compromise between the Bury-Him and the Save-Him camps is really a sneaky pro-life apology.

But the incredibly baroque definition of “author” Hix comes up with by the book’s final chapter, “Post-Mortem,” seems finally to commit the very homicide Barthes called for. The difference is that where Barthes simply argued that the idea of an author is now for critical purposes otiose, Hix so broadens the denotation of “author” that the word ceases really to identify anything. Nouns, after all, are supposed to pick things out. But while Hix claims that “to deny the assumption of homogeneity, though it entails that the historical writer is not the exclusive locus of meaning, does not entail that meaning has no locus,” he ends up preserving the idea of a meaning-locus by making that locus such a swirling soup of intricate actions and conditions and relations that he essentially erases the author by making the denotation of his signifier vacuous. It ends up being a kind of philosophical Westmorelandism: Hix destroys the author in order to save him.

Though his conclusions do not resolve the problem they address, Hix’s attempts to organize and defend them yield some impressive scholarly writing. He has a rare gift for the neat assembly of different sides of questions, and his complex theory has the virtue of being able to account for many of the ambiguities in the way we do in fact make such claims as that Luke is the author of the third Gospel, Jefferson is the author of the Declaration of Independence, George Eliot is the author of Middlemarch, and Franklin W. Dixon is the author of The Hardy Boys at Skeleton Cove. His section on “Schizoscription” is a fascinating discussion of the “implied author” in first-person persona-lit like Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” and it affords, believe it or not, a genuinely intelligible theory of how irony works. And ingenious examples, like that of the brain-damaged patient in A. R. Luria’s The Man with the Shattered World who could write but not read what he wrote, not only help Hix argue against the notion that the writer is the ultimate “insider” with respect to his own work, they’re also just plain cool.

It’s Hix’s flair for images and examples that may make Morte d’ Author of interest to general lit.-lovers. His prose is often witty and conversational, and his talent for constructing test cases offers a welcome relief from the painstaking academic detail he tends to fall into. I’m not sure just how much familiarity with twentieth-century literary theory the book requires. Hix does, roundaboutly, give most of the background to the dead-author conundrum. But a reader who’s not comfortable with ghastly jargon like Foucault’s “The conception of écriture sustains the privileges of the author through the safeguard of the a priori” is going to get flummoxed, because Hix tends to toss quotations like this around without much gloss. It’s finally hard for me to predict just whom, besides professional critics and hardcore theory-wienies, 226 dense pages on whether the author lives is really going to interest. For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane. As William (anti-death) Gass observes in Habitations of the Word, critics can try to erase or over-define the author into anonymity for all sorts of technical, political, and philosophical reasons, and “this ‘anonymity’ may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090342)

Many philosophers at leading American departments are specialists in metaphysics: the study of the most general aspects of reality such as being and time. The major work of one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, is “Being and Time,” a profound study of these two topics. Nonetheless, hardly any of these American metaphysicians have paid serious attention to Heidegger’s book.

The standard explanation for this oddity is that the metaphysicians are analytic philosophers, whereas Heidegger is a continental philosopher. Although the two sorts of philosophers seldom read one another’s work, when they do, the results can be ugly. A famous debate between Jacques Derrida (continental) and John Searle (analytic) ended with Searle denouncing Derrida’s “obscurantism” and Derrida mocking Searle’s “superficiality.”

The distinction between analytic and continental philosophers seems odd, first of all, because it contrasts a geographical characterization (philosophy done on the European continent, particularly Germany and France) with a methodological one (philosophy done by analyzing concepts). It’s like, as Bernard Williams pointed out, dividing cars into four-wheel-drive and made-in-Japan. It becomes even odder when we realize that some of the founders of analytic philosophy (like Frege and Carnap) were Europeans, that many of the leading centers of “continental” philosophy are at American universities, and that many “analytic” philosophers have no interest in analyzing concepts.

Some attention to history helps make sense of the distinction. In the early 20th century, philosophers in England (Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein) and in Germany and Austria (Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel — all of whom, with the rise of the Nazis, emigrated to the United States) developed what they saw as a radically new approach to philosophy, based on the new techniques of symbolic logic developed by Frege and Russell.

The basic idea was that philosophical problems could be solved (or dissolved) by logically analyzing key terms, concepts or propositions. (Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions of what does not exist — e.g., “The present King of France” — remains a model of such an approach.) Over the years, there were various forms of logical, linguistic and conceptual analysis, all directed toward resolving confusions in previous philosophical thought and presented as examples of analytic philosophy. Eventually, some philosophers, especially Quine, questioned the very idea of “analysis” as a distinctive philosophical method. But the goals of clarity, precision, and logical rigor remained, and continue to define the standards for a type of philosophy that calls itself analytic and is dominant in English-speaking countries.

At roughly the same time that analytic philosophy was emerging, Edmund Husserl was developing his “phenomenological” approach to philosophy. He too emphasized high standards of clarity and precision, and had some fruitful engagements with analytic philosophers such as Frege. Husserl, however, sought clarity and precision more in the rigorous description of our immediate experience (the phenomena) than in the logical analysis of concepts or language. He saw his phenomenology as operating at the fundamental level of knowledge on which any truths of conceptual or linguistic analysis would have to be based. In “Being and Time” Husserl’s student, Heidegger, turned phenomenology toward “existential” questions about freedom, anguish and death. Later, French thinkers influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, especially Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, developed their own versions of phenomenologically based existentialism.

The term “continental philosophy” was, as Simon Critchley and Simon Glendinning have emphasized, to an important extent the invention of analytic philosophers of the mid-20th century who wanted to distinguish themselves from the phenomenologists and existentialists of continental Europe. These analytic philosophers (Gilbert Ryle was a leading figure) regarded the continental appeal to immediate experience as a source of subjectivity and obscurity that was counter to their own ideals of logical objectivity and clarity. The analytic-continental division was institutionalized in 1962, when American proponents of continental philosophy set up their own professional organization, The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), as an alternative to the predominantly (but by no means exclusively) analytic American Philosophical Association (APA).

Over the last 50 years, the term “continental philosophy” has been extended to many other European movements, such as Hegelian idealism, Marxism, hermeneutics and, especially, poststructuralism and deconstruction. These are often in opposition to phenomenology and existentialism, but analytic philosophers still see them as falling far short of standards or clarity and rigor. As a result, as Brian Leiter has emphasized, “continental philosophy” today designates “a series of partly overlapping traditions in philosophy, some of whose figures have almost nothing in common with [each] other.”

The scope of “analytic philosophy” has likewise broadened over the years. In the 1950s, it typically took the form of either logical positivism or ordinary-language philosophy, each of which involved commitment to a specific mode of analysis (roughly, following either Carnap or Wittgenstein) as well as substantive philosophical views. These views involved a rejection of much traditional philosophy (especially metaphysics and ethics) as essentially meaningless. There was, in particular, no room for religious belief or objective ethical norms. Today, analytic philosophers use a much wider range of methods (including quasi-scientific inference to the best explanation and their own versions of phenomenological description). Also, there are analytic cases being made for the full range of traditional philosophical positions, including the existence of God, mind-body dualism, and objective ethical norms.

Various forms of empiricism and naturalism are still majority views, but any philosophical position can be profitably developed using the tools of analytic philosophy. There are Thomists and Hegelians who are analytic philosophers, and there is even a significant literature devoted to expositions of major continental philosophers in analytic terms. The claim that working in the analytic mode restricts the range of our philosophical inquiry no longer has any basis.

This development refutes the claim that analytic philosophers, as Santiago Zabala recently put it, do not discuss “the fundamental questions that have troubled philosophers for millennia.” This was true in the days of positivism, but no more. Zabala’s claim that analytic philosophers have not produced “deep historical research” is similarly outdated. It was true back when the popularity of Russell’s “A History of Western Philosophy” signaled the analytic disdain for serious history. Now, however, even though many analytic philosophers still have little interest in history, many of the best current historians of philosophy employ the conceptual and argumentative methods of analytic philosophy.

Because of such developments, Leiter has argued that there are no longer substantive philosophical differences between analytic and continental philosophy, although there are sometimes important differences of “style.” He has also suggested that the only gap in principle between the two camps is sociological, that (these are my examples) philosophers in one camp discount the work of those in the other simply because of their personal distaste for symbolic logic or for elaborate literary and historical discussions.

I agree with much of what Leiter says, but think there are still important general philosophical differences between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, in all their current varieties. These differences concern their conceptions of experience and of reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy appeals to experience understood as common-sense intuitions (as well as their developments and transformations by science) and to reason understood as the standard rules of logical inference. A number of continental approaches claim to access a privileged domain of experience that penetrates beneath the veneer of common sense and science experience. For example, phenomenologists, such as Husserl, the early Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty try to describe the concretely lived experience from which common-sense/scientific experience is a pale and distorted abstraction, like the mathematical frequencies that optics substitutes for the colors we perceive in the world. Similarly, various versions of neo-Kantianism and idealism point to a “transcendental” or “absolute” consciousness that provides the fuller significance of our ordinary experiences.

Other versions of continental thought regard the essential activity of reason not as the logical regimentation of thought but as the creative exercise of intellectual imagination. This view is characteristic of most important French philosophers since the 1960s, beginning with Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. They maintain that the standard logic analytic philosophers use can merely explicate what is implicit in the concepts with which we happen to begin; such logic is useless for the essential philosophical task, which they maintain is learning to think beyond these concepts.

Continental philosophies of experience try to probe beneath the concepts of everyday experience to discover the meanings that underlie them, to think the conditions for the possibility of our concepts. By contrast, continental philosophies of imagination try to think beyond those concepts, to, in some sense, think what is impossible.

Philosophies of experience and philosophies of imagination are in tension, since the intuitive certainties of experience work as limits to creative intellectual imagination, which in turn challenges those alleged limits. Michel Foucault nicely expressed the tension when he spoke of the competing philosophical projects of critique in the sense of “knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing” and of “a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.” However, a number of recent French philosophers (e.g., Levinas, Ricoeur, Badiou and Marion) can be understood as developing philosophies that try to reconcile phenomenological experience and deconstructive creativity.

In view of their substantive philosophical differences, it’s obvious that analytic and continental philosophers would profit by greater familiarity with one another’s work, and discussions across the divide would make for a better philosophical world. Here, however, there is a serious lack of symmetry between analytic and continental thought. This is due to the relative clarity of most analytic writing in contrast to the obscurity of much continental work.

Because of its commitment to clarity, analytic philosophy functions as an effective lingua franca for any philosophical ideas. (Even the most difficult writers, such as Sellars and Davidson, find disciples who write clarifying commentaries.) There is, moreover, a continuing demand for analytic expositions of major continental figures. It’s obvious why there is no corresponding market for, say, expositions of Quine, Rawls or Kripke in the idioms of Heidegger, Derrida or Deleuze. With all due appreciation for the limits of what cannot be said with full clarity, training in analytic philosophy would greatly improve the writing of most continental philosophers.

Of course, analytic philosophers could often profit from exposure to continental ideas. Epistemologists, for example, could learn a great deal from the phenomenological analyses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and metaphysicians could profit from the historical reflections of Heidegger and Derrida. But in view of the unnecessary difficulty of much continental writing, most analytic philosophers will do better to rely on a second-hand acquaintance through reliable and much more accessible secondary sources.

It may be that the most strikingly obscure continental writing (e.g., of the later Heidegger and of most major French philosophers since the 1960s) is a form of literary expression, producing a kind of abstract poetry from its creative transformations of philosophical concepts. This would explain the move of academic interest in such work toward English and other language departments. But it is hard to see that there is much of serious philosophical value lost in the clarity of analytic commentaries on Heidegger, Derrida, et al.

There are some encouraging recent signs of philosophers following philosophical problems wherever they are interestingly discussed, regardless of the author’s methodology, orientation or style. But the primary texts of leading continental philosophers are still unnecessary challenges to anyone trying to come to terms with them. The continental-analytic gap will begin to be bridged only when seminal thinkers of the Continent begin to write more clearly.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090433)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090494)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090498)

the fuck? people make 100k doing nothing but repairing the damn things, much less building them. if he constructed a real mass spectrometer (and the author isn't just confusing "mass spectrometer" with general "spectrometer"), that's insane.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30131143)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30090657)

Different strokes / different folks: Many poasters ITT have explicitly disagreed with your analysis.

Enjoy your occasional Texas Monthly article. I'll continue poasting content here.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30092146)

"Silence at Baylor," by JESSICA LUTHER and DAN SOLOMON. "A MUCH-TALKED-ABOUT FOOTBALL PLAYER AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY—WHOM COACHES “EXPECT BACK” THIS FALL—IS CURRENTLY ON TRIAL FOR THE SEXUAL ASSAULT OF A FELLOW STUDENT. QUESTIONS NOW SWIRL AROUND WHAT THE PROGRAM KNEW AND WHEN THEY KNEW IT." http://www.texasmonthly.com/article/silence-at-baylor/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30093386)

"About Face," by Patricia Marx. "Why is South Korea the world’s plastic-surgery capital?" http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30093157)

I subscribe to the NYT and the NYer and make an effort to see if any long pieces in each's weekly magazine piques my interest.

Many of these are from a daily email newsletter I receive that includes a section of curated best longreads from the week every Saturday & Sunday.

The balance are topics of interest that I've specifically sought out via googling, reading books of essay collections, et cetera.

FWIW, I'm nowhere near running out of content.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30096557)

The two men, Ri Ryong-ha and Jang Su-gil, were torn apart by antiaircraft machine guns, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. The executioners then incinerated their bodies with flamethrowers.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30096629)

policing — and crime — in Los Angeles," by Geoff Manaugh. http://nyti.ms/1RkpQaa

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30124561)

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/7-up-vs-coke-part-2-from-dot-com-darling-to-disaster-the-spectacular-flameout-of-andrew-gladney-heir-to-a-fortune-andrew-gladney-went-fr/Content?oid=2492120

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30125954)

http://nyti.ms/1RiK2wp

A length examination of the NFL's early concussion research and its ties to the tobacco industry, which quickly prompted an official response from the League, which is detailed here: http://nyti.ms/1RoN6E0

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30131032)

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12321274/alex-rodriguez-return-new-york-yankees

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3169613&forum_id=2#30131612)