Frankenstein’s creation of life was not simply an act of scientific hubris, but an exposé of patriarchy. By arrogating the creation of life solely to himself, Frankenstein’s deed of giving birth results in the death of everyone he loved, culminating in his own mortal struggle with his creation in the sterile frigidity of the Arctic.
Frankenstein was originally a philosophical novel, Michael Saler reveals in his review of The Annotated Frankenstein. Mary Shelley used her monster to comment on the terrors of the French Revolution, patriarchy, social justice, and slavery.
The pleasure we derive from sex is also bound up with our recognizing, and giving a distinctive seal of approval to, those ingredients of a good life whose presence we have detected in another person. The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
The new book by Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex, addresses exactly what you’d think it would based on a glance at its title. Read more excerpts at Brain Pickings. 
I have always read the work of Gillian Rose with envy. She seems really involved with something, committed to something; there is a position into which she has reasoned herself and with which she must live in accordance. In that sense, she is very unlike run-of-the-mill academics such as myself, ‘poor idiot professors,’ as Žižek calls us, who write on this and then on that, who are pulled in all kinds of directions, and never seem to arrive anywhere.
Lars Iyer on his year of reading philosophy. 
Among the brand-name French theorists of the mid-20th century, Roland Barthes was the fun one. (Foucault was the tough one, Derrida was the dreamy one, Lacan was the mysterious one — I like to imagine them sometimes as a black-turtlenecked, clove-smoking boy band called Hors de Texte, with the hit album “Discipline ’n’ Punish.”)
Sam Anderson, opening his NYT Mag riff on Mythologies with quite possibly the greatest lede of all time.

Source: The New York Times