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 on a trip to London and Spain. In Trafalgar Square with a spare half hour, I plunge into the National Gallery because I want to see the Arnolfini portrait again. Alas, van Eyck’s cadaverous old merchant and his heavily pregnant (or not pregnant) young wife (or betrothed, or recently dead ex-wife…
by Richard Farr If you’re not from the US or the UK, you probably think that the recent dispute over the Chagos Islands is a below-the-fold story of no interested to you; perhaps, with less excuse, you think that even if you are from the US or the UK. In either case you’d be wrong.…
by Richard Farr My family jokes that I can break a computer by looking at it; God knows, I’ve tried. They also say that I hate technology, and would rather have lived two hundred years ago — wooden table, candle, quill pen — but that’s a slight exaggeration. Once in a blue moon I will…
by Richard Farr A recent news story about the fate of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance returns me to some reflections on a failing most of us exhibit to some degree: we find it convenient to invent people. If the story of Shackleton’s grandiosely-branded Imperial Antarctic Expedition is not familiar, I recommend Alfred Lansing’s spare and…
by Richard Farr Terrified people from ethnic minorities being threatened, rounded up, and beaten by heavily armed men in uniforms or not-quite-uniforms: we have seen these images before. In the US, the theory endlessly parroted to us over the decades has been that the Founders’ exceptional wisdom meant American institutions would protect us from such…
by Richard Farr That year on Oahu I was renting half a small ranch house in Kahala. Typically, I would greet the evening with a glass of wine next to the pool, enjoying the pretense that I’d joined the idle rich. Not that day. As the sun went down I sat at my desk in a…
by Richard Farr On February 14 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest opened at London’s St. James’s Theatre. There was mild consternation over the lack of a moral, but most people let this pass — as well they might, having been treated to a first view of the funniest play ever written. Only four days…
by Richard Farr My sister and I live five thousand miles apart, but since we both reside in the early twenty-first century it’s easy to stay in touch. Of the many channels available to us we use WhatsApp messages mostly, with a call once a week or so. You might wonder then why we have…
by Richard Farr It’s a ritual now. Every Sunday morning I go into my garage and use marker pens and sticky tape to make a new sign. Then from noon to one I stand on a street corner near the Safeway, shoulder to shoulder with two or three hundred other would-be troublemakers, waving my latest…
by Richard Farr This is the first part of a two-part essay. I got into political philosophy out of sheer puzzlement. Surely we ought to know how to run human communities by now? But political ideologies were like religions: everyone thought they knew what was true and everyone thought that everyone who disagreed with them…
by Richard Farr I read somewhere that Mexico City has more museums and art galleries than any city in the world except London. Seems plausible: two weeks wasn’t enough, and would not have been enough even without all the hours spent wandering the boulevards, exploring labyrinthine food markets, and drinking tall glasses of maracuya juice…
by Richard Farr As everyone knows, the word philosopher comes from two Greek words — philo, a rich, buttery pastry and by extension a person with a weakness for any self-indulgence, and sofa, a couch. Hence: a person who’d love to find a comfortable chair. If you are a plumber or a tax attorney, or…
by Richard Farr If we could dig up Karl right now, he might be tempted to look at all the current drama in D.C. and say: “Red Scare Theatre repeats itself, but the first umpteen times it’s tragedy and then eventually it’s farce.” That’s not quite right though, because this kind of perennial crowd-pleaser always…
by Richard Farr After I moved from the UK to the US it took me only a couple of years to cede to my friends’ pleas and start driving on the right. When in Rome, and all that. But I still like to irritate Americans by maintaining that we Brits are better at this essential…
by Richard Farr I’m sixteen and a serious intellectual wannabe. Any lunch break, you can find me in the school corridors discoursing at length on a well-thumbed Hermann Hesse novel, or sharing with some lucky classmate the insights I’ve gleaned from half a dozen pages of Sartre. I’ve also acquired a taste for Gauloises Disque…
by Richard Farr The tree was immense even by local standards: a western red cedar that might have been a thousand years old. A botanist would want to measure it; I only wanted to touch its wrinkled face, or kneel among the roots and capture a dramatic snapshot looking up along the trunk. But it…
by Richard Farr For several weeks I’ve had an article by the excellent Rick Perlstein squatting unread in my Ought-To-Read list. The title is Everything You Wanted to Know About World War III but Were Afraid to Ask. I am afraid to ask: although I ought to want to know, right now I don’t. “The…
by Richard Farr Even if you are sympathetic to Marx — even if, at any rate, you see him not as an ogre but as an original thinker worth taking seriously — you might be forgiven for feeling that the sign at the East entrance to Highgate Cemetery reflects an excessively narrow view of the…
by Richard Farr I will use this column to defend myself against the accusation, first made by my surgical assistant Mr. Alan Turing, that I was negligent in the death of an individual under my medical care. Or, as one armchair prosecutor has said, that I am “a stereotypically British sentimentalist who thinks dogs are…
by Richard Farr In 2001, in order to become an American citizen, I had to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” Abjure. Prince. Potentate. That this vocabulary from the 1790s persisted…