The Ambiguity of Virtue

Recent News

• The Atlantic considered some of the moral, legal, and medical questions posed by Henry Greely’s The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction.
• Brian Goldstein, author of The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, wrote at Black Perspectives about the complex politics of gentrification, and how the line between gentrifier and gentrified is rarely clear-cut.
• David Halperin’s How To Be Gay was included on a New York Times list of 25 recent works that have shaped the L.G.B.T.Q. literary genre over the last two decades.
• At Aeon, The Classical Debt author Johanna Hanink traced the surprisingly early origins of Greek nostalgia for a greatness supposedly lost.

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June 26: Jazz and the Literary Imagination

The often-heard cliché that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—which has been variously attributed to Thelonious Monk, William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, and Elvis Costello, among others—seems to take for granted that it’s ludicrous to use one expressive medium to comment on or respond to another. But such cross-media encounters can actually be remarkably generative. As but one example, literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards points to African American literature, which has taken shape in relation to music from its very inception. What Edwards shows in his latest book, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, is tha…