No Man Righteous
Bob Dylan’s reactionary album Slow Train Coming exemplifies fundamentalism’s alluring promise of the escape from identity.
Quakes and Ale: Comparing Cultures in Catastrophe
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.
Achilles 2.0
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.
Twilight of the Cruise
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…
The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being
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 Memoriam, Salinger
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.
The Tourist Sublime
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
Open Books: The E-Reader Reads You
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.
Judging Books by Their Covers
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.
SEO & The Disappearing Self
(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…
Open Secrets: Literature as Gossip in the Digital Age
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…
The Loser Wins
Zuckerberg is not just any loser. His victory is not a win for equality, but instead signals the rise of a new, no less inegalitarian…
Love Worth Fighting For
More than ever, we now need to think of love as ennobling resistance to what alreadyis, modeling the idea that difficult things are worth the…
Spontaneity On Demand
Salvador Dalí. A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds (1936) “Mediating our identity and our experience recapitulates it in a form that can circulate and be…
children are our future: resistance, addiction and the digital natives
It’s easy enough to amass anecdotal evidence of rising internet addiction. The marathon Asian gamers who prefer to starve rather than leave their terminal; the…
On the Virtues of Ingratitude
Gratitude hurts our critical capacities by forbidding dissatisfaction with a scale that tilts, albeit by chance, in one’s favor.