Hi, I'm Becca. I am a staff writer at The New Yorker and an editor at The Point. Previously, I was the non-fiction book critic of the Washington Post. My essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, was published Metropolitan Books in the US and Virago in the UK in April 2024. The New York Times called it "splendidly immodest" and "exhilarating" and The Guardian called it "bracing and brilliant." It was a New York Times editors' pick and a New Yorker weekly recommendation. It was also one of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, one of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024, one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2024, one of Mother Jones's Best Books We Read This Year, one of the Prospect's Books of the Year, and one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Non-Fiction from 2024. Finally, I am also a PhD candidate (on indefinite hiatus) in philosophy at Harvard, but i remain perhaps delusionally convinced that someday I will finish my dissertation. These days I live in Washington, DC, with this person, whom I love. Here you can find all of my Washington Post pieces, which will come out each week, generally speaking.
To keep up with my writing/rantings, subscribe to my substack here. As a writer: I have contributed essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The TLS, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Yale Review, The Drift, The Baffler, and more. These days, I write mostly for the Washington Post about non-fiction, but occasionally I write essays on fiction and whatever else for other venues. I am the winner of the first annual Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism (see more here) and the 2023 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (see more here). In 2017, I was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. A few authors I especially love are Joseph Roth, Italo Svevo, Henry James, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist, Marie de France, and Norman Rush. My agent is Anna Sproul-Latimer of Neon Literary. As a (lapsed?) philosopher: I am primarily interested in aesthetics (especially aesthetic value and its relationship to other types of value), the philosophy of love and sex, and the history of German philosophy, especially Martin Heidegger, although I have increasingly consuming secondary interests in political philosophy. In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," published in The British Journal of Aesthetics, I defend aestheticism, the view that aesthetic value is sometimes a partial grounds of moral value. I describe aestheticism in more detail in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art. If I ever get around to completing it, my dissertation will be about some combination of the following: what it is to be a beautiful person, why evolutionary psychologists are wrong about human beauty, the ethics of exclusionary romantic/sexual/aesthetic preferences, and what role the state should play in ameliorating inequitable distributions of intimate "goods." I hold a first-class MPhil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A., summa cum laude with high honors, from Dartmouth College, where I studied philosophy & German (and cultivated an enduring distaste for fraternities). I receive many emails asking for advice about graduate school applications. I have answered some frequently asked questions on this page. As I note there, I do not consider myself an expert in how to write a successful graduate school application, and I urge all prospective grad students to consult resources online, as well as supervisors who have served on admissions committees, rather than me! Before the pandemic, I followed Hegel in regarding nature as geistlos, but now, like any good Heideggerian, I am a big fan of hiking. Here I am in the Berkshires, which I love
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about aesthetic value, beauty, and whether philosophy is aesthetically (or otherwise) valuable--although speaking continues to terrify me, and I think I am a lot worse at it than I am at writing! You can listen here: https://shows.pippa.io/ipse-dixit/episodes/becca-rothfeld-on-consuming-beauty
3 Comments
Edward
12/28/2019 05:36:40 am
Your discussion of Weil’s belief that on earth one can’t take any action toward beauty reminded me (please excuse the egotism) of a qualm I’ve sometimes felt about the idea of devoting my life to mathematics (assuming that some form of Platonism obtains): Although mathematics has indeed, as Russell famously put it, “supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere,” even the great masters of it who wander deep into its flowered wood are in a sense walking through something sealed off from their touch and smell. Heaven would be where mathematical beauty is somehow not just merely observed but simultaneously observed and made—smelled and touched for the first time. Perhaps this is why some people are strongly drawn toward the act of writing fiction: It can combine the glories of observation that one finds in books, with participation in the creation of the structure of that observation. Anyway, these are likely trivial thoughts, but they seem relevant. Incidentally, your terror is misplaced; you did a fine job speaking. I hope you do more podcasts!
Becca rothfeld
12/28/2019 06:43:32 am
No, not trivial at all! Beautifully articulated, very interesting, and, I suspect at first glance, probably in large part true! Thank you!
Edward
12/30/2019 07:13:34 am
Kind words. Thanks! Leave a Reply. |
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