How Walter Benjamin’s Iconic Antifascist Essay Escaped Europe
Ed Simon on the Enduring Political Relevance of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
December 13, 2024
By Ed Simon
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Ed Simon
Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for Lit Hub, and the editor of Belt Magazine. His most recent book is Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, the first comprehensive, popular account of that subject.
In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse
Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies”
Deadly Sins and Heavenly Virtues: On the Timeless Duality of Being Human
Ed Simon Explores the Ways in Which Good and Evil Have Manifested Throughout the Ages
Exhuming Dracula’s Ancestors: What Vampires Reveal About Our Latent Fears
Ed Simon Explores the History and Tradition of Unearthing the Long-Buried Past in Eastern Europe
Life Imitates Art: On The Sorrows of Young Werther, Moral Panic and the Power of Books
Ed Simon Considers the Phenomenon of Killing Yourself (and Others) in the Name of Literature
Boccaccio’s Modern Life: What The Decameron Reveals About Contemporary Anxiety
Ed Simon Considers the Act of Storytelling as a Means of Preserving Our Humor and Humanity in Tumultuous Times
A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World
Ed Simon on "The Most Important Story Ever Told," That of Humanity's Transactional Relationship With Evil
Remembering Samuel Roth, the Bookseller Who Defied America’s Obscenity Laws
Ed Simon on Free Speech, Book Bans and Court-Mandated Censorship, Then and Now
In Praise of the Paranormal Curiosity of Charles Fort, Patron Saint of Cranks
Ed Simon on the Porous, Ever-Shifting Boundaries Between Science and Speculation
In Honor of Duke Ellington: Here Are 15 Great Books About Jazz
Ed Simon Recommends Langston Hughes, Dorothy Baker, Geoff Dyer, and More
The Yinzers of Glasgow: On the Scottish Origins of Pittsburgh’s Unique Dialect
Ed Simon Demystifies and Reclaims Pittsburghese
The Byronic Revolution of Che Guevara
Ed Simon on the Lives and Legacies of Two Icons of Romanticism and Rebellion
Jesus Had Needs, Too: On the Sacred Blasphemy of The Last Temptation of Christ
Ed Simon Considers the Literary and Cinematic Representations of Christianity's Chief Paradox
A Poet Is a Poet Is a Poet: Ed Simon on the Significance of Gertrude Stein’s Subversive Poems
Remembering the Queer Modernist Poet on Her Sesquicentennial
In Praise of the Tangible Sacredness of the Printed Word
How Physical Copies of Shakespeare's First Folio Cemented the Bard's Legacy
Too Good To Be True: How Angels Continue to Inspire
Ed Simon Considers the Cultural Legacy of These Heavenly Archetypes
On Drinking, the Devil, and Paradise Lost
Ed Simon Searches for Milton's Grave While Getting Blackout Drunk in Pubs
Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence
Ed Simon Asks Us to Reconsider Our Definitions of Good Style
A History of Demonology is a History of the World
Ed Simon Offers a Demonic Poetics
To Write a History of Pittsburgh is to Write a History of America
Ed Simon on the Paris of Appalachia
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