George Scialabba in Commonweal:
The passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century was perhaps the most deeply felt crisis in European intellectual history. The Age of Reason had seen such extraordinary strides in scientific discovery and political liberty that the future progress of both mind and society seemed to many already marked out. Two groups of people were unhappy about this. Traditionalists, both religious and political, regarded the party of Reason as a nuisance, to be swatted away rather than argued with in earnest. The Enlightenment’s scientific materialism and anti-authoritarianism seemed to them sheer perversity, old heresies in a new garb. But by the time the party of Reason morphed into the party of Revolution, it was too late for swatting; and by the mid-nineteenth century the traditionalists had retreated into a long defensive crouch that lasted until quite recently.
The Romantics’ quarrel with the Enlightenment was more intimate and impassioned. The Romantics embraced Enlightenment rationalism, as far as it went, but protested that it left many important questions unanswered. “Is that all?” the nineteenth century rebuked the eighteenth. “How does your Reason account for Spirit, Beauty, Community, Art? Why are Intuition and Imagination not equally valid sources of truth?”
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Beginning in late September, 
In May 2018, Childish Gambino (Donald Glover’s musical alter-ego) dropped the single 
I
Ever since the first blood-forming stem cells were successfully transplanted into people with blood cancers more than 50 years ago, researchers have wondered whether they developed 
THE YEAR IS 1906. Theodore Roosevelt is in the White House. In New York, the newspapers are reporting on the political aspirations of William Randolph Hearst, unrest in Russia, and the latest dividends from US Steel. Scientific American is running articles about exploring the Sargasso Sea. In Boston, The New England Journal of Medicine is discussing new treatments for typhus and tuberculosis. Upton Sinclair’s new novel The Jungle, recently out from Doubleday, portrays the oppressive working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry—Jack London calls it “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery”—and it’s taking the country by storm. In October, the Chicago White Sox play the Cubs in the country’s first intracity World Series, which the Sox go on to win (in a massive upset) four games to two.
In various ways, Pedro Almodóvar’s terrific new film represents a culmination or point of arrival. The Room Next Door, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, marks the director’s first time working in English and telling a story set entirely outside Spain. It is also a clear admission – from a film-maker strongly associated with costume, production design and bodies – of an essential bookishness: his belief, expressed in his recently published collection of stories The Last Dream, that his vocation is “literary”, and it’s merely a quirk of fate that the bulk of his written output has been 22 screenplays, which he also directed. The film concerns two writers, Ingrid, a war reporter suffering from cancer (Tilda Swinton), and Martha (Julianne Moore), a novelist with whom Ingrid spends her final weeks. Though Almodóvar does away with many of the reference points in the source material, Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, he introduces plenty of his own. The Room Next Door opens at a Manhattan bookshop, where Martha is doing a signing, and ends with a quotation from “The Dead” – and it isn’t the only bookshop, or mention of James Joyce.
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at 
I
It is incredibly difficult to say something new about social norms. The question “What is a social norm?” has been given many detailed answers by philosophers and social scientists. Social norms are often theorized as rules of some kind; most of the ensuing literature concerns the nature of such rules and how they are established or maintained. Despite the mountain of literature on social norms, Charlotte Witt’s Social Goodness not only makes an original contribution to the literature, but it also does so in a way that points toward important, underexplored regions of conceptual space.
College towns are a little like Vegas. They’re fallen capitals, scourged by development and game-day apartments. The boomer professors got there and built the Museum of the American Rebel; soon after, they withered into Cadaver Bohemias. The Godfather, the department chair who hired me in 2016, was nonetheless confident that I’d assimilate to the sprawling “family” he had helped build there. “Faculty regard Oxford as a suburb of New Orleans,” he told me, referring to the city where I’d lived for more than a decade. “So it won’t be too much of a change.” It was an amiable conversation, in which he assured me he’d hired his first choices for the two posts they’d needed: me as an instructor, and the Superstar writer-in-residence, a bestselling novelist and infamous Twitter provocateur.