Vagina Analogues
The revolution in female sexuality made possible by vibrators finds its sinister counterpart in the revolution in warfare made possible by unmanned aircraft
Dancing Days
For men, stripping is just a job. For women, it's a psychological complex
The Question of Pain
The genius and demons of Pentagram’s Bobby Liebling
Camp Walker
Our reporter in South Korea sneaks onto the base to see what an amicable military occupation looks like.
Relatable Transitional Objects
Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama establishes Alison Bechdel as the most important cartoonist working today
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.