Spotlight Site: Nico Muhly
“He approaches the work of others with the expertise and shared delight of a practitioner. His post on ‘Beyoncé’ is surely one of the finest record reviews ever written.”
Robert Cottrell visits Nico Muhly’s blog.
Spotlight Site: Aeon
“This is the opposite of dumbing-down. This is smarting-up…”
Robert Cottrell on Aeon and the proliferation of wonderful writing in the field of popular science.
Poet of the Month: Nathalie Handal
“It’s important our works are read beyond the wreckages of where we come from…”
Nathalie Handal, The Missing Slate’s Poet of the Month, talks to Pratyusha Prakash.
Spotlight Site: Edge
“Oscar Wilde said something to the effect that he never needed to go out in the evening when he could find such wit and wisdom in the books he had at home. I feel something similar when I read interviews on Edge.”
Robert Cottrell’s Spotlight Site series visits John Brockman’s Edge.
Opera Kabul
“there are ten moons in this room,/ a thousand miles in this corridor/ but not a single whisper inside us…”
Poem of the Week (October 26), by Nathalie Handal.
“Kabul stops time. Its mountains are songs…â€
A photo essay by Nathalie Handal, exploring the beauty of Kabul.
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The urban naturalist
“These poems hold a devotional quality of their own…”
Leeya Mehta reviews ‘Final Cut’, Saleem Peeradina’s fifth collection of poems.
Spotlight Site: Practical Ethics
“The subject-matter often teeters at the very edge of what society will accept, and very occasionally jumps off into the abyss…”
Robert Cottrell on Practical Ethics, a blog connected to the Philosophy Faculty at Oxford.
Unbearable Splendor
“Leaving traces of its own continual metamorphosis, the book is an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors.”
Katy Lewis Hood reviews ‘Unbearable Splendor’, by Sun Yung Shin.
Spotlight Site: Daf Yomi
“A model of how a blog can add value to a mainstream publication by doing something eccentric and focused, something with a life and a coherence of its own.”
Robert Cottrell on Adam Kirsch’s Daf Yomi blog.