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.
Running on Empty
With the FuelBand, Nike has built something that's supposed to get people moving. For all the wrong reasons.
Solving Happiness
When we start quantifying happiness, whose grins count?
Footnote Fairy Tale
Francis Spufford's Red Plenty presents us with an alternative timeline that failed to materialize: the triumph of Soviet central planning over Western capitalism through cybernetics. Could it have been?
The Secret Shopper
“Inattentive,” “rude,” and “dumb” service workers damage the value of their bosses’ product in subtle acts of psycho-social sabotage so pervasive that an entire industry of mystery shoppers has sprung up to combat it
Reviving Cabiria
Fellini is most known for his surrealism in La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, but the most revolutionary idea he contributed to cinema was to render a complicated female character in a comedic role like Cabiria.
Everybody Have Fun Tonight
LMFAO’s music provides an endless party with no real cause for celebration, turning fun into a forced march through the hyperreal