Scoreboard Jesus
Can Tim Tebow, the latest American exemplar of “muscular Christianity,” get a witness?
Not Great Men
Georges Simenon’s The President shows how history swallows its agents.
Cruise Control
Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.
Do Nothing, Be Nothing
Violence, idleness, and nihilism in Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
No Resolutions
Lauren Berlant wants you to break your New Year’s resolutions. Cruel Optimism at the beginning of the end.
Be Aware: Nick Kristof’s Anti-Politics
“How can you watch people die in the streets?” “You don’t look, you close your eyes.”
Who's That Girl?
The heroine of Fox’s New Girl has more in common with a logo design than its audience
The Trouble with Digital Conservatism
Conserving the self in a culture of productive narcissism
You and Mark Aren't Friends
Facebook’s Timeline turns your old updates into an unexpurgated biography
The Great Leap Forward
The Long March in a New World
The Search for Posthumanism
Notes from the 2011 Singularity Summit
Keira Knightley’s Vagina
A Dangerous Method taps the allure of sexual dysfunction
The Reluctant Writer
Recently published work by modernist Mina Loy from Dalkey Archive
Literary Tantalus
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956 (Edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck, Cambridge University Press) It’s fitting that Samuel…
I'm With Stupid
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, New Directions Publishing Stupidity is always conditional. An observer discovers some ignorance in a subject, or else the subject…
The Color and the Sound
Erik den Breejen’s pop synesthesia and the Beach Boys’ SMiLE