Munich is the Austin of Bavaria.

Madonna has been accused of “cultural appropriation.” However, none of the critics are aware that so-called cultural appropriation is otherwise known as life. In the sphere of popular culture, it is otherwise known as late capitalism. There’s nothing remarkable about it.

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New information has surfaced about Sartre’s refusal of the Nobel Prize for Literature:

A letter sent by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964 declining the Nobel Prize for Literature came too late to avert one of the biggest debacles in its history, Swedish media reported Saturday.

Sartre’s letter arrived nearly a month after he had been picked as the top choice by the Nobel Committee, the daily Svenska Dagbladet reported, based on archival material made available at the end of a customary 50-year period of secrecy.

The report throws light on the sequence of events leading to Sartre’s decision to become the only person to willingly turn down the world’s most prestigious literary prize.

Perhaps Sartre was prescient: his “literary” works are hardly read anymore. Even worse, his philosophical texts are now antiques from the bygone age of existentialist Marxism.

For example, in Search for a Method Sartre asserts “we are convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality” (1968, p 21). Who today would have the courage to embrace either of these claims?