A Heaven of Hell
...worked except “Verlaine,” and how “Hell” with its reference to A Season in Hell linked them by making them into a new version of Verlaine and Rimbaud. They create themselves...
Towards a Black Muslim Ontology of Resistance
...These chapters were always missing, carefully excluded from the abridged version of her youth I got: the stories she would tell us of Somalia. Ha Nolaato! I was sure I...
The Beautiful Struggle
A meditative syllabus on Saidiya Hartman’s book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
A moment of dreaming about higher education
...this kinds of discussion; in the long, excruciating age of Reagan, anything not directly conducive to the accumulation of profits will slowly or quickly be changed into a version of...
Getting In
Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections and the Racial Politics of Literary Awards
Dream Political Party
The daddy archetypes representing different sexual appeals of the dating-simulator game Dream Daddy are reimagined as “dadsonas” of the political, not parenting, type. In RPG style, you take on the role of an overwhelmed outsider trying to make his way through a party and figure out which ideological hottie to go home with.
On the Variety of Ways to Not Praise Charlie Hebdo
...do with their courage. To praise “expression” in the abstract by honoring a particular version of what might make it praiseworthy makes it no longer abstract. Another organization they didn’t...
Welcome to "Dietland": Beauty and Subversion
...in Sarai Walker’s novel Dietland would agree with me on this front. You might have heard of the book (the paperback version comes out Tuesday), which received appropriately rave reviews...
Back to School
...time, asking permission to pee, how to become a version of themselves which is more excellent than all their peers, and how to live inside the confines of an externally...
Real Human Being
...also Adam Smith and other thinkers articulated and universalized a version of the human driven by the imperative of survival and perfectly embodied in Western Man. Human beings were rendered...
Called to Account
...are all subjected to a ramped-up, entrepreneurialized version of the old Protestant ethic: work hard and save for the future. But for the wealthy this means being financial entrepreneurs, exposing...
The Fire Next Time
...injured by gunfire, undermining the official story that the police engaged in a 'shootout.' The police commander (Col. Ubiratan Guimarães), who continues to advance this version of events, was elected...
The Austerity Kitchen at Large
...is their own. --From "The Land of Cockaigne" (Dutch version, ca. 15th century) If you can read German, I invite you to check out my article, entitled "Woher Kommt das...
COPS Release Screening at Spectacle Theater
...Gierucki, the film historian who rediscovered it at a Michigan antiques sale only two years ago, has sent us an advance copy of the full, restored digital version of the...
Reading Sofia Samatar: Vallon
...I’m arrested. Here’s one version of an argument: too often, the formally lettered try to “capture” the stories of “the unlettered.” We—we must be used here—want to “write down,” “arrange,”...
Helen Gurley Brown, 1922-2012
...recall the look of approval—no, affection—that crossed her face as she issued her silent blessing to a younger version of myself that morning at the elevator, what I find is...