Academic titles aren’t everything. But they signpost what might not otherwise be salient; I, and others like me, are present as members of the academy. | Continue reading
by Andrea Scrima An anthology I’ve edited with David Winner, titled Writing the Virus, has just been published by Outpost19 Books (San Francisco). Its authors—among them Joan Juliet Buck, Rebecca Chace, Edie Meidav, Caille Millner, Uche Nduka, Mui Poopoksakul, Roxana Robinson, Jo … | Continue reading
Ducks on a pond in Brixen, South Tyrol, in December of 2020. | Continue reading
by Eric Miller To the mainland When we climb the stairwell out of the depth of the ferry, where our car rests parked amid grimy trucks, we find taut bands of yellow plastic tape setting off the tables and benches of the observation decks. We have to sit far from other people. Som … | Continue reading
by Alexander C. Kafka Can the moon strike twice? Sadly, no. The question hovers over John Patrick Shanley’s new film Wild Mountain Thyme because it aims for the same sort of bittersweet heartache seasoned with gritty and eccentric comedic beats that characterized his Oscar-winnin … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow Last month I argued that wine tasting notes don’t give us much information about how a wine tastes. Most tasting notes consist of a list of aromas that are typical for the kind of wine being described. But we can’t infer much about quality or distinctiveness from … | Continue reading
Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler: THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES has worked long and hard at looking like the West—even better than the best. The world’s tallest building, with its glistening spire, looms over the shoreline of the gleaming city of Dubai, proof of the Emiratis’ technocratic … | Continue reading
Dan Falk in Undark: It is to biologist Sean B. Carroll’s credit that he’s found a way of taking a puzzle that could easily fill volumes (and probably has filled volumes), and presenting it to us in a slim, non-technical, and fun little book, “A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance … | Continue reading
Brian Morton in Dissent: I first heard the phrase “Stay in your lane” a few years ago, in a writing workshop I was teaching. We were talking about a story that a student in the group, an Asian-American man, had written about an African-American family. There was a lot to criticiz … | Continue reading
Santiago Zabala at Al Jazeera: Unlike the September 11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis – the first two supposedly global events of the 21st century – this pandemic has not spared anyone anywhere, and its consequences will continue to be felt for decades in every corner of t … | Continue reading
Ather Farouqui in IIC Quarterly: Hindi—the original name of the language now known as Urdu—and modern Hindi are two distinct languages. Despite being a fairly new language, notions regarding Urdu’s origins and history are as hotly debated amongst the public at large as among scho … | Continue reading
Pamela Sneed in The Paris Review: Uncle Vernon was cool, tall, hazel-eyed, and brown-skinned. He dressed in the latest fashions and wore leather long after the sixties. Of all of my father’s three brothers, Vernon was the artist—a painter and photographer in a decidedly nonartist … | Continue reading
Perry Anderson in the LRB: By repute, literature on the European Union and its prehistory is notoriously intractable: dull, technical, infested with jargon – matter for specialists, not general readers. From the beginning, however, beneath an unattractive surface it developed co … | Continue reading
Thomas Geoghegan in The New Republic: Here’s a little thought experiment: What would happen if, by a snap of the fingers, white racism in America were to disappear? It might be that the black and Latino working class would be voting for Trump, too. Then we Democrats would have no … | Continue reading
Malcolm Keating in Psyche: In premodern India, debates were entertainment in courtly settings, a sport for profiteers and clever men who enjoyed a quick turn of phrase or put-down. Successful debaters gained followers, fame, even wealth. Those pragmatic aims intertwined with nobl … | Continue reading
A conversation between Molly Crabapple, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Greenberg, Hari Kunzru, and Jana Prikryl: | Continue reading
Rhodes Center · The Left, Divided Over the Extraction Economy | Continue reading
Robert Rubsam at Commonweal: In the summer of 1944, a camera was smuggled out of Auschwitz. Inside it was a roll of film with four images from the gas chambers at Birkenau, taken by members of the Jewish Sonderkommando. These photos were distributed worldwide by the Polish resist … | Continue reading
John Williams at the New York Times: Because there are many things to say about Susan Taubes’s remarkable 1969 novel “Divorcing,” and many of those things concern the grim side of both real life and life in the book, I’d like to start by saying that it’s funny. It’s not a comic n … | Continue reading
Ann Wroe in MIL: The day has been grey, dreary and drizzly, and evening is settling in – a typical covid evening, alone in my flat, with another radio concert playing from an empty hall. It seems a good moment for candles. Which means, even better, it’s time for matches. There’s … | Continue reading
The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs —for Dick It takes more than gasoline and gumption to get you to Zortman—more than whimsy or a wild inkling to rekindle history. It takes a primal prairie need, a kinship with Old Man Winter, with Napi hunkering in sunless gulches, a longi … | Continue reading
Michael Maar in the New Left Review: There is an ancient piece of classroom wisdom that is not entirely misguided when it states: steer clear of adjectives! Editors are unlikely to grumble about a missing adjective, but they will use up their pencils crossing out superfluous ones … | Continue reading
Andrew Jewett in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Back in 2013, another in a long line of tussles over scientism broke out. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, told humanities majors at a Brandeis University graduation ceremony that they represented “the resis … | Continue reading
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Nadav Samin in The Hedgehog Review: When I was a graduate student in international relations in the early 2000s, my teachers would frequently invoke the famous, though possibly apocryphal, response of the late Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai to the question of whether the Fre … | Continue reading
Montana Ray at The Point: The Confederate immigrants didn’t impose their way of life in São Paulo’s rural interior. On neighboring plantations, enslaved women were raising the white artists who would become the country’s major modernists. Brazil’s most famous modernist painter, T … | Continue reading
Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review: Samuel Johnson famously remarked, ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know.’ Virginia Woolf politely added that Englishwomen al … | Continue reading
Ceri Radford in The Independent: Given that literature thrives on probing difficult but defining experiences, you would expect the shelves of the canon to creak with the weight of great writers exploring motherhood. After all, what is a tricky love affair compared to expelling a … | Continue reading
Domestic Violence 1. It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans. Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village. Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the subu … | Continue reading
Mizrahi and Barry in Nature: The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of an imaging method called cryo-electron microscopy. On bestowing the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that this technique has “moved biochemistry into a new era”. W … | Continue reading
Nayereh Doosti in Agni: Nayereh Doosti/AGNI: Before the pandemic, “Story about a Boy” might have simply read as an absurdist narrative. It’s about a couple whose job involves offering assisted dying to individuals identified as “high-risk,” people who must live in camps or be eut … | Continue reading
Jim Baggott in Physics World: “Surely, after 62 years, we should have an exact formulation of some serious part of quantum mechanics?” wrote the eminent Northern Irish physicist John Bell in the opening salvo of his Physics World article, “Against ‘measurement’ ”. Published in Au … | Continue reading
Lawrence B. Glickman in the Boston Review: For many conservative pundits, the election of Donald Trump marked the moment when the Republican Party abandoned its longstanding claim to being the “party of ideas.” For example, in June 2017 longtime Republican policy advisor Bruce Ba … | Continue reading
Andrew Jewett in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Back in 2013, another in a long line of tussles over scientism broke out. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, told humanities majors at a Brandeis University graduation ceremony that they represented “the resis … | Continue reading
Barbara Graustark in The New York Times: Could there possibly be an upside to the long, stressful periods of isolation that so many people have endured during the pandemic lockdown of 2020? When we emerge, will we see the world in a new way? Could there even be a silver lining to … | Continue reading
After the Election: A Father Speaks to His Son He says, they will not take us. They want the ones who love another god, the ones whose joy comes with five prayers and songs to the sun in the mornings and at night. He says, they will not want us. They want the ones whose… | Continue reading
Leslie Jamison at Bookforum: Léger keeps trying to break away from her mother’s story by scrutinizing the lives of other women, but the maternal shadow—no matter how much she turns away from it—keeps edging into the frame. At their core, these books are about involuntary attentio … | Continue reading
Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker: When Michel Leiris died, in 1990, at the age of eighty-nine, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, in Libération, that Leiris was “indisputably one of the great writers of the century.” That would seem to be a big claim, especially if … | Continue reading
Christian Gibbons in Taxis: In the 17th century, two Portuguese priests named Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe are faced with a devastating moral dilemma. For the past few weeks, they have been living among a village of Japanese peasants, not far from Nagasaki. The peasan … | Continue reading
Karen Hao in MIT Technology Review: Credit scores have been used for decades to assess consumer creditworthiness, but their scope is far greater now that they are powered by algorithms: not only do they consider vastly more data, in both volume and type, but they increasingly aff … | Continue reading