Nothing threatens capitalism’s best excuse for itself — that it is the economic system best suited to individual liberty and human flourishing — more than…
When I was living in Madrid, I read an article in El País one day that spoke of el valorado concepto anglosajón de “fair play” —the valued Anglo-Saxon concept…
The computer is the liar that always tells the truth. If you believe the lie—that what the computer does is beyond human comprehension, that its power exceeds its use value—then you are doomed to be its slave.
The personality of the adult Rimbaud, who writes letters home to his mother detailing and bewailing the state of his finances, is so different from that of the adolescent poète maudit that it seems improbable that the two belonged to the same person. Then again, Rimbaud, like us all, was always full of contradictions.
Bracing for disaster in 1990, St. Louisans’ knew that to single out their town for divine wrath would be to invite ridicule. They binge-drank and “pigged out,” secure in the geographical, geopolitical — indeed, cosmic — insignificance apparent to them every day.
Énard’s attempt to modernize the Iliad is even more explicit than Joyce’s attempt to modernize the Odyssey in Ulysses. Indeed, Zone reads as if it were narrated by Molly Bloom—were she to have been cast as a battle scarred Achilles rather than an unfaithful Penelope.
The grid plan emanates from our weaknesses, this layout of avenues and streets, New York City, this system of 90 degree angles…it’s homogenizing, in a city where there is no homogenization available, where there is only total existence, total cacophony…
A review of Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness is the kind of criticism — pertinent, witty, sophisticated but without sophistry — in which one can glimpse a…
In commemoration of J.D. Salinger, we repost one of our favorite essays, “Better to Fade Away than to Burn Out?” Editor Mary Borkowski defends authorial privacy in an era where digitally enabled self-promotion is the norm; and with the rise of self-publishing—an imperative.
When we travel, the meanings consumerism ascribes to objects become opaque, and the choices we have to make — where to eat, where to go, what to do — can abruptly seem arbitrary, pointless. The ubiquitous marketing discourse that normally serves to orient us instead prompts terror in the midst of plenty. The consumerist bounty
E-books promise not a plenitude of ideas and narratives but a wealth of information to better rationalize the unpredictable behavior of readers. E-readers make us into the content.
One solution to the publishing quandary is in these very editions. To make books more appealing as objects, even as aesthetic objects thanks to thoughtful design, taps into part of what makes reading a pleasure as a tangible sport, not something you download and scroll through on an electronic device.
(via) “On Facebook, our communication is assessed like online advertising — how many click-throughs did it inspire? This prompts us to make what we say…
It’s a great moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Todo Sobre Mi Madre: A transsexual woman stands on a stage and explains all the reconstructive and cosmetic…