Ed Simon
JSTOR Daily
Pittsburgh, PA, United States
Contact Ed
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
| Past: |
|
Past articles by Ed:
Mary Sidney and the Voice of God
Philip Sidney’s attempt at translating the Psalms ended with his early death. Then, his sister took up the cause—and proved herself the superior poet. → Read More
How Many Errorrs Are in This Essay?
Literature's history is a history of mistakes, errors, misapprehensions, simple typos. → Read More
Speak of the Devil
The who, what, where, and why of Faust and his legend. → Read More
On War and Literature
War literature, at its best, exists not as scripture but as liturgy, not to explain but to remember. → Read More
All Male Cats Are Named Tom: Or, the Uneasy Symbiosis between T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx
Class and religious differences helped thwart the would-be friendship between two cultural titans, suggesting opposites may attract, but may not always adhere. → Read More
Here We Are Again!—How Joseph Grimaldi Invented the Creepy Clown
Every limb of him had a language. → Read More
As Far from Heaven as Possible
How Henry Wadsworth Longfellow interpreted Reconstruction by translating Dante. → Read More
This Isn't the Essay's Title
Paradoxes signify a null-space where the regular ways of thinking, of understanding, of writing, no longer hold. → Read More
Who's There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story
Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. → Read More
The World Is All That Is the Case
When you come to Ludwig Wittgenstein on the road, you must kill him. The knife that you use is entitled the Tractatus, and he'll hand it to you first. → Read More
Return to Pirate Island
The history of piracy illustrates a surprising connection to democratic Utopian radicalism—and, of course, stolen treasure. → Read More
Walking Shadows
Meet the actors who first brought Shakespeare’s characters to life. → Read More
On Memory and Literature
Now we're all possessors of personal super computers that can instantly connect us to whole libraries — there can seem little sense to make iambs and trochees part of one's soul. → Read More
The Heretical Origins of the Sonnet
The lyrical poetic form’s origins can be traced back earlier than Petrarch. → Read More
On Literature and Consciousness
This is the greatest opening line in imaginative literature, because it’s the first one ever written. How can the invention of fiction itself be topped? → Read More
Machine in the ghost
Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates that will shape the secular world → Read More
Who's Afraid of Theory?
The conclusion among many folks is that Theory is a kind of philosophical Mad Libs disappearing up its own ass. → Read More
We Need a Monument to the Unknown America
A memorial makes a statement about who is worth preserving. Why not a sacred and beautiful nothingness? → Read More
In Defense of Kitsch
The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions. → Read More
The Book That Invented the World
Abraham Ortelius, with his comprehensive atlas, gave us not disenchantment, but a differing enchantment—a sense of the sheer magnitude… → Read More