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
Robert Reich in The Guardian: How have a relative handful of billionaires – whose vast fortunes have soared even during the pandemic – convinced the vast majority of the public that their wealth shouldn’t be taxed in order to support the common good? They have employed one of the … | Continue reading
Michelle Taylor at The New Yorker: Most readers know Eliot as the arch-impersonal poet, who bewildered the world with “The Waste Land” and proclaimed that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” Readers of this Eliot might, at first, have difficult … | Continue reading
Bob van der Linden in Smithsonian: The greatest pilot of the greatest generation has passed. Seventy-nine years to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, famed test pilot, World War II ace, and the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound, Brig. Gen. Charles “Chuck” … | Continue reading
Judith Schalansky at The Paris Review: There are not many surviving literary works older than the songs of Sappho: the down-to-earth Epic of Gilgamesh, the first ethereal hymns of the Rigveda, the inexhaustible epic poems of Homer and the many-stranded myths of Hesiod, in which i … | Continue reading
Jody Serrano in Gizmodo: Although your first instinct when you see these photos might be, “Oh god,” we promise that it’s not an upcoming extreme weather event or some alien species coming to invade Earth. (Given that it’s 2020, you’re forgiven for thinking anything that’s not obv … | Continue reading
Flee fro the pres, and duelle with sothfastnesse; Suffyce unto thy good, though hit be small… …………. Chaucer, ‘Balade de bon conseyl’ A Standing Ground However just and anxious I have been I will stop and step back from the crowd of those who may agree with what I say, and be apar … | Continue reading
Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter: This much is all true: I believe that “quality television” is in fact of extremely low quality, that “YA literature” is not literature, that “OA literature” as it were looks more and more like YA with each passing year, that superher … | Continue reading
Greg Gerke in the Los Angeles Review of Books: I only realized I’d been looking for something over some years when I finally found it in an obscure archived page of The Washington Post from February 1985. Hugh Kenner’s review of Gilbert Sorrentino’s essay book Something Said. The … | Continue reading
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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Those of us living in democracies tend to take the idea for granted. We forget what an audacious, radical idea it is to put government power into the hands of literally all of the citizens of a country. Where did such an idea come from, and … | Continue reading
Kea Krause at The Believer: At twenty-seven weeks, my baby was a sweet potato—and also a croissant, a slingshot, and a sugar glider. At thirty-one weeks, she was a head of romaine lettuce, a croquembouche, a foam finger, and a small-clawed otter. There were inconsistencies. At tw … | Continue reading
Jackson Arn at Art in America: BRUEGEL SEEMS LIKE A BETTER FIT for a certain type of film than for poetry. His indiscriminate eye; his contempt for obvious “takeaways”; his wide, lucid images withholding judgment—in all these ways, he anticipates the “slow cinema” of the last few … | Continue reading
Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker: This month marks the American release of the director Mira Nair’s six-part television adaptation of “A Suitable Boy,” Vikram Seth’s beloved, kaleidoscopic novel of early post-Partition India, from 1993. (It began streaming on Acorn TV on December … | Continue reading
Carrie Arnold in Nature: In her job as a physician at the Boston Medical Center in Massachusetts, Sondra Crosby treated some of the first people in her region to get COVID-19. So when she began feeling sick in April, Crosby wasn’t surprised to learn that she, too, had been infect … | Continue reading
Woman Unborn I am not born as yet, five minutes before my birth. I can still go back into my unbirth. Now it’s ten minutes before, now, it’s one hour before birth. I go back, I run into my minus life. I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel with bizarre perspectives. Ten years… | Continue reading
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