Richard Farr grew up in England and has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell. Briefly an academic philosopher, and now a full time writer, his books include Emperors of the Ice, a National Science Teachers Association Best Book of the Year; The Truth About Constance Weaver, a sort of anti-mystery; and The Babel Trilogy, a speculative fiction series with a philosophical twist. He is working on a satirical novel set in an alternative London, a book of cocktail recipes picked up during encounters with famous philosophers, and several children's books. He mentors students and adults online from his home north of Seattle, where he also spends a lot of time hiking and sea kayaking. Despite a potentially life-threatening allergy to social media, he can be found online at richardfarr.net. Email: richardalanfarr [at] gmail.com
by Richard Farr I’m writing this 37,000 feet above Vestmannaeyjar, a chain of islands off Iceland’s south coast. Or so the screen tells me – I can’t see the view because I’m wedged into 38E, a middle seat at the back near the loos. The ambient noise and vibration are roughly what you’d experience with your…
by Richard Farr You might think London’s National Portrait Gallery is a temple of celebrity, and it’s true that many of the faces on these walls belong to mere royalty, or influential past Nabobs, or those more recently glossy with fame. But the people who draw me back again and again are the ones who…
by Richard Farr At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such crimes were the most natural thing in the world. —Joachim Fest,…
by Richard Farr This is the final part of My Drug Problem, a no doubt annoyingly elliptical three-part essay on psychedelics. Part One, A Mere Analogy, is here; Part Two, The Woman in the Cave, is here. Interest in psychedelics has gone so mainstream that it’s embarrassing not to be able to do the usual thing,…
by Richard Farr This is the second part of a three-part essay, My Drug Problem. Part one, A mere analogy, is here. Your life is not going according to plan and you’ve started to wonder what the gods are playing at. Still, the decision to consult the Oracle at Delphi is not one you took…
by Richard Farr Part one: A mere analogy You’ve always dreamed of foreign travel and you’re aware that there’s a long history of people doing it, and benefiting from it. But you live under a regime that closed the borders a couple of generations ago, at the same time criminalizing the act of researching potential…
by Richard Farr We called my English teacher Scab for no particular reason except that it took the edge off our terror. A big man in a double breasted jacket, he wore tinted glasses that hid his expression. His head looked as if it had been carved rather carelessly from a boiled ham. “You are…
by Richard Farr From our Men’s Modern Living correspondent: I know, I know. You’re thinking: “Don’t even start. I saw two dozen spittle-flecked jeremiads on this topic last week alone, including that 17,000-word essay by Randomdude in one of those illustrated monthly magazines they have at my club. Substack? It was called something like Apocalypse…
by Richard Farr Early in life, when a child’s tender ear is supposed to be protected from blasphemy, I must have overheard someone say it’s only a game. I went to the kind of English boarding school at which rugby, patriotism and Christianity were serious business, competed with each other for our attention, and sometimes…
by Richard Farr Lucky you, reading this on a screen, in a warm and well-lit room, somewhere in the unparalleled comfort of the twenty-first century. But imagine instead that it’s 800 C.E., and you’re a monk at one of the great pre-modern monasteries — Clonard Abbey in Ireland, perhaps. There’s a silver lining: unlike most…