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…
How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying bitterness of this life so alien to human life— a life in which nothing happens except in its self-awareness!
Ten years before she would publish Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë sent a poem to poet laureate Robert Southey asking for his opinion. Their resulting exchange is interesting…
Bertolt Brecht appeared before the HUAC on October 30, 1947. Brecht’s testimony consisted of wry jokes and evasions. He played dumb and frequently blamed sloppy…
Several Accounts of the Meeting Between James Joyce and Marcel Proust. From Proust at the Majestic by Richard Davenport-Hines: May 18, 1922. The Majestic, a…
Karl Marx writes to Abraham Lincoln on November 22, 1864 Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance…
I began to think more carefully about why Sartre might have been photographed. Cartier-Bresson took the portrait in 1946, less than a year since Sartre…
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.