Book Review: The Trouble With Being Born by Emil Cioran

The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995) was a precocious thinker, reading the likes of Diderot, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche at the age of 14 (the latter having a major influence on his work). His precociousness was later exemplified by first major philosophical work, On the Heights of Despair, published in 1934, when…

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Book Review: The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

With a rapidly expanding global population, we need to find ways to grow crops in both an efficient and sustainable manner. For example, it can’t involve an even bigger reliance on agrochemicals, which are unsustainable. Instead, we need to grow crops to feed billions of people in a way that is in harmony with the…

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Book Review: Two Lessons on Animal and Man by Gilbert Simondon

Gilbert Simondon (1924 – 1989) was arguably one of the most original and innovative thinkers in contemporary French philosophy. A student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simondon’s work has had an influence on various disciplines ranging from philosophy and anthropology to media and cybernetics. As Aislinn O’Donnell describes: ‘On one page, he may describe an electrical field,…

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Book Review: Crawl Space by Jesse Jacobs

Crawl Space is a psychedelic graphic novel created by Jesse Jacobs, published by Koyama Press, and embodies the artist’s unique style of art and storytelling. Jacobs’ first graphic novel published with Koyama Press is his psychedelic creation myth By This You Shall Know Him (2012). This was followed, in 2014, by the publication of Safari…

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Book Review: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Author and mountaineer Jon Krakauer (who also wrote Into the Wild) recounts with disturbing clarity the 1996 Everest disaster, in his best-selling book, Into Thin Air (which was adapted into the Everest film – apparently deviating a lot from the book). Krakauer is an expert storyteller who transmits the intense feelings of stress, panic, and vigilance that the climbers…

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