Author Archives: cristian

In one of his letters to his good friend Atticus, Cicero wrote: ‘I am reproaching myself far more than you, and if I do reproach you it is as my alter ego’. By that, Cicero meant that Atticus was like a second self to him, a close and trusted friend. Before Franz Mesmer and FreudContinue reading “Alter egos and friends”

The medieval period was a lab experiment in history writing. The historiographical legacy of classical antiquity had been rich, but the types and methodologies of history-writing developed between around 500 and 1500 CE were not only more vast, but also formative for how history was to be written in the West. To the ancient canonicalContinue reading “The fertility of medieval history writing”

Every author has to walk a fine line when writing a book. Fiction requires the creation of a hall of mirrors, or illusions hiding the cluttered backstage where the authors work their tricks. Many writers of non-fiction who deal in ideas and persuasion need to make sure they target the right audiences and don’t upsetContinue reading “The wasteland of popular history”

If you subscribe to Karl Popper’s famous ‘paradox of tolerance’, you should consider its corollary, what I would call, the ‘paradox of myths’. According to Popper, the pursuit of tolerance has the strange effect of nurturing intolerance as the way by which tolerance is made possible. We see this perverse principle in action in relationContinue reading “The paradox of myths”

Most people will have heard of at least one ancient myth captured by the Roman poet Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses, at least by name, if not by narrative. And if not of Daphne who was turned into a laurel tree, or Arachne into a spider, or of Pasiphae and the Minotaur, then surely they will haveContinue reading “Metamorphoses”

If there is one statue that very few are keen to bring down, it’s that of modernity. Between Charles Taylor, Gaston Bachelard and Bruno Latour, the mythology of the modern age, its certainties, Supreme Scientific Court, incontestable faits faits (forged facts, Bachelard), its ‘Constitution’ (Latour) and ‘immanent frame’ (Taylor) is exposed, disassembled and shown forContinue reading “Immanent self-flagellation”

‘I hate the man, I can’t watch any of his films or read any of his books. I just can’t!’, a friend recently told me. Many are indeed finding it hard to separate the author from the work, especially when one or the other clashes with deeply-held views and beliefs. If an author has sinnedContinue reading “Identity crisis”

There is no outside text, Jacques Derrida once wrote, and immediately the waters of deconstruction flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty years. The project of iconoclasm hasn’t started with the tumbling and defacing of statues in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Nor should iconoclasm be considered solely as a reaction againstContinue reading “The iconoduly of iconoclasm”

How do you turn an unthinkable idea into one that everyone can accept, one that becomes a cultural commonplace? Not quickly, is one answer. Another answer is by squeezing it through the Overton windows. The Overton window is a concept named after Joseph Overton which tries to explain the political acceptability of a policy atContinue reading “Opening the Overton windows on the Middle Ages”

Back in 1994, the engineers at the American software company General Magic started using the word ‘cloud’ to describe what later came to be known as ‘cloud computing’. The cyber-skies became seriously overcast in 2000 when Amazon pushed the first cloud product, called Elastic Compute Cloud. All of us push data up into the cloudContinue reading “The medieval Cloud”