The August 21 issue of the New Yorker profiles the posthumously influential Jewish-German critic Walter Benjamin. The article, called ‘The Philosopher Stoned’ and written by Adam Kirsch, is ostensibly an essay on Benjamin’s attempt — an unsuccessful one by any measure — to gain inspiration and insight through the use of hashish. The discussion of the drug’s effect on Benjamin’s life and thinking aren’t particular valuable and merely form bookends for the more interesting central substance of the article, which describe Benjamin’s move away from academic philosophy towards popular criticism (a deflection which would have a positive effect on Benjamin’s thematic and stylistic accessibility), his shallow and facile flirtations with Marxism, and the state of his thinking towards the end of his life in the early 40s, as he struggled to finish his unwieldy Arcades Project with Nazism expanding rapidly across Europe.