Bad Math and Poor Eyesight: Reconfiguring Dante’s Hellscape

Arnaud Zimmern
Dante's imagery in the Inferno is haunting. But, for all the care he took in crafting his canti, recent scholarship has revealed errors of scale and proportion in his descriptions of the infernal environs. Was he just a lousy arithmetician? Was he deliberately undermining his narrative with a bit of ironic miscalculation? Or are Dante's apparent mistakes in fact occasions for him to explore a fundamental question about man's redemption?

In Distrust of Movements

Wendell Berry
The legions of health-food shoppers and the interminable discussions of sustainability bear witness to what is by now a well-established feature of our cultural landscape: the organic movement. But Wendell Berry, one of the most influential champions of the cause, turns his pen (and his plow) against the seductive idea that what is properly a way of being can be re-branded and shrink-wrapped into a movement.