Teenage Screams
...bite at the hand that feeds. Though Coppola abandoned acting decades ago, that image of her seems etched onto the public’s retinas—44, yet forever the beloved only daughter, the indulged...
The New Inquiry Vol. 55: Testing
...the university system as both constantly struggling and in competition with the private universities which are taken as the benchmark of academia against which all others must be evaluated. “We...
Little Boxes on a Hillside
...they’ve enabled. Suburbs disenfranchise people who can’t drive, like children, the elderly, and those who can’t afford a car. People who can drive often face long commutes to work, and...
The Art of the Rebuttal: Katherine Dunn
...if you're being fouled, foul in return. Much of the commentary assumes that Tyson often commits fouls and that the bites are merely an extreme version of his usual unsportsmanlike...
Unsolicited Advice for Living in the End Times, Vol 13
...of course, can still think of ourselves. It’s a bit late for our society to go full-monty selflessness, and I’m certainly not suggesting running off to the Peace Corps or...
The Unfuckables
...before. —"Take a Girl Like You," Kingsley Amis I love to play strippers and to imitate them. I love using that idea for comedy, but the idea of actually going...
The Post-Colonial Space Opera
...engagement with semiotics and linguistics bears favorable comparison to Samuel Delany’s classic novel, Babel-17. Both novels concern themselves with how language shapes ontological perspective, thought and culture, thus effecting how...
Simple and Plain
...him completely. His friends, no matter how much they loved and respected him, remained a paid entourage whom he could never completely believe actually loved him for real. "He constructed...
Feinting Spells
...“magical realism” came into vogue in the late 60s and 70s, when the West’s monopoly on the literary started facing serious competition, around the time a Colombian writer named Gabriel...
The Eaten World
...up my results online. As a gastroenterology fellow, I hear a fair bit about the microbiome--a term referring to the aggregate genetic material of the microorganisms that colonize our bodies’...
Ramadan Diaries, Day Eighteen
...Chaïm Soutine, Still Life with Rayfish. c. 1924. The Met. Back from traveling—several days of not fasting—to menstruation. Not fasting today either. It feels a bit strange to...
The Faces of Rimbaud
...The choice is deliberate. Carjat’s photographs are every bit as caricatured as his satirical drawings for the feuilletons; he is not so much interested in capturing the poet’s likeness as...
Martin Scorsese Started the Fire: Hugo and The Bad Thing
...the Bad Thing is arbitrary and senseless is not beside the point; it is the point. As Event, it signifies “arbitrariness.” And while it’s a clumsy bit of writing –...
Variations on a Theme: Forgotten Terrorisms
...The anarchist belief in violent direct action, formulated in the policy of 'propaganda by the deed' (rather than by the word), reflected the particular bitterness of these struggles....
Beauty Blogosphere Summer Solstice
...my entire world of "sellouts" vs. "non-sellouts" upside-down and I began to realize that the whole thing was a bit more complicated and that maybe I shouldn't be all Judge...
What Does a Woman Know?
...turned out to be a Nazi and died a horrible death. The Mummy presents women a little bit differently. The one main female character, Evelyn Carnahan, is a scholar herself,...