Dances With Anarchists
“The most dangerous woman in America,” dead for seven decades, lingers on. Emma Goldman’s legacy has not always seemed so secure. There was little use…
Bad Romance
For his Spring 2007 collection, fashion designer Alexander McQueen staged his presentation in the round at the Cirque d’hiver-Bouglione, the legendary circus in Paris. A…
Yes We Keynes!
A review of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us by John Quiggin
Intimacy as Text; Twitter as Toungue
“Internet socialization is far closer to a 19th century mode of intimacy than to a dystopian future of tragically disconnected robot prostitutes. There’s a Jane Austen-ish quality to online social life. The written word gains unmatched power and inarguable primacy.”
Epic Fail
On July 1, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in Northern California began a hunger strike to protest egregious human rights abuses perpetrated…
Rapture, Rainbows and Reproduction
“Recording and sharing our response to natural beauty promises a kind of feedback loop….It’s mastery and surrender simultaneously.”
Going LeBron
The “skills myth”—namely, that one is better equipped to read, Google things, and follow orders after earning a B.A.—will crumble. Overdeveloped analytical skills and inflated expectations will become liabilities as hoards of nubile young hopefuls climb over each other to work for free. Forget gap years, camp counseling, or waiting tables. Teenagers will work in
Social Media, Social Factory
Social media—Facebook and other similar services that have integrated with portable devices to permit continuous interactivity—have furthered consumerism’s ameliorating mission. They enhance the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more self-revelatory, less passively conformist, conserving the signifying power of our lifestyle gestures by broadcasting them to a larger audience and making them seem less
Towards A New Film Criticism
What is Hollywood? Hollywood is a pool of money, power, and people. Hollywood is a monomaniacal schizophrenic, making films at the voices’ instruction. Each film represents a different voice in its head; some are violent, some frightening, some romantic, some beautiful. But all of them praise the perfect beauty of the commodified image.
Sins of the Father
What made Breaking Bad's Walt so endearing was his awkward, reticent Dad love and the unimaginable lengths he went to to provide for his family. With his body count racking up, Walt’s paternal rationalization is harder to buy.
Is Entourage Sorry?
I gave up watching Entourage about the same time I gave up flipping through Maxim magazine at newsstands. Even though they both appealed to part of me, it was a dark sad part that I knew I had to grow out of, or risk being stuck in perpetual adolescence. But last summer, my brother was
A Library Sans Livres
Will the library of the future be a reliquary of precious artifacts or the information processor that obliterates them?
You Know You're the Prettiest Girl
The temptation to dismiss multimedia artist Laurel Nakadate as a wallowing narcissist, a sub-Jackass-level prankster, or an emotional terrorist is strong. She appears as all those things in the retrospective of her work at P.S. 1, inviting the audience’s contempt as well as their lascivious stares.
Gay Life Against Marriage
In this way, the gay political project wasn’t just emancipatory or messianic, nor could it be exhausted by a list of demands; from within, it undercut capitalism’s charge that there be no alternative by fucking a different world into being.
Love in the Age of Self-Consciousness
Tradition — “how things are done here” — has been fatally disrupted. We can enter an elevator in any city or an Italian restaurant in any American town and understand what to expect and what to do. And thanks to the universality of money and the pervasive norms of capitalist market exchange, we trust we
School's Out Forever
The hope is that every student has a teacher or two over a decade and a half that really makes them question and think, but either way, we silently acknowledge that they’ll spend the majority of their young vigor-filled lives quivering at the arbitrary mercy of petty kooks and jowly tyrants.