Nobody Knows You're a Drone
For a citizenry subjected to technologically enhanced surveilance, watching the watchers will prove a veritable game of drones
Search for a Method
Hard numbers meet soft power when it comes to tallying Pakistani drone-strike deaths
We Mock What We Don't Understand
How the paranoid logic of nuclear deterrence became a laughing matter and authorized the even crazier madness of consumerism
The IRL Fetish
The idea that we can no longer access unmediated “real life” is a pretense that allows us to congratulate ourselves for our disconnection.
Bathrobe Boy
Mid-century pattern for a men's bathrobe I don’t have a novel in me, but a novel has me in it. Although I consider myself a writer,…
The Suit
Recently I came across a twelve-part essay on fashion by a French novelist and intellectual. It was a predictably tweedy take on the act of…
Enigma Deviations
Codebreaker and pioneering computer scientist Alan turing’s life and death illustrate how spies often feel the need to encrypt their personal lives
Yids
Jenna Brager reviews Leela Corman's graphic novel Unterzakhn, mining tenement life and for a Jewish identity without Israel.
Violence in ENGL 329: The 19th Century English Novel
The phantom Canadian girlfriend of the Ivies did significantly go on strike, at last, for a week, in a few departments, when bros from Connecticut found their Billy Budd lecture blocked by someone else’s history.
Agents Without Agency
The spylike pursuit of information rather than knowledge makes us function less as thinkers than processors, personal computers — and inefficient, low-powered ones at that. We are not the subjects who know things or intentionally produce knowledge; we are instead means of circulation — objects through which information passes with more or less noise in
The Plague Years
From Bieber videos to gang violence to blog posts, all metaphors point to virus.
Dans le Rouge
In French, the phrase is 'Carrément dans le rouge,' meaning 'squarely in debt.' That’s why hundreds of thousands of students and union members involved in Quebec’s education strike have taken to pinning little red squares of cloth to their clothes.
The Ways We Don’t Talk About Wealth
Dollar sign by Maximus Chatsky By the end of 2012, I will most likely have made just shy of a million dollars in three years.…
Strangers in a Strange Land
Religious intolerance can take subtle forms in both the personal and political worlds.
Wes Anderson's Arrested Development
He has his critics, but it's lonely not to fall in love with Wes Anderson.
Our Man in Great Neck
An American grandparent recalls infiltrating the Soviet Union disguised as an ordinary tourist from Long Island.