David Pennington

We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called... See more

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • National Bestseller • A brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived and understood.

He took up this path not out of some particularly lazy disposition, but because of his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding. ‘[T]o do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual,’ Oscar Wilde observed decades before Cioran.

"One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."

- Nikola Tesla

Q: Who are your favorite artists in any genre, classic or contemporary? Your favorite writers? Where did you get those shoes?

A: It has to be Goya ‘s Caprichios at the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars. (See Milos Foreman ‘s Goya’s Ghosts which shows the awesome connections.) I love Picasso ‘s freedom. Leonardo da Vinci, of... See more

In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.

They all get repackaged and rebranded—thank the digital gods for those apps that make old stuff look new! Everything is now... See more

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”