Judging Books by Their Covers
...a bit exaggerated, though coming in so many octave ranges they are hard to ignore. It might be more useful to say print is changing and in our attention economy,...
The Withdrawal Method
...the matter?” Distaste for the work of coupledom makes a bit of shop discipline necessary. Kipnis observes that “the well-publicized desperation of single life — early death for men; statistical...
Ars longa, vita brevis
...She has written her books, and they remain. The reporter who doxed her attempted to justify himself with this bit of weaseling: “[B]y announcing that she would lie on occasion,...
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...
Plantation Neoliberalism
...the Brazilian “gradually disappeared from my visual field” is just a bit rich. Writing in the clear light of an early morning, one in which subjects and objects have re-achieved...
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...
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...
Uncertain augury
...bit, but feebly. The hawk sat still, looked down at the gathering crowd, who were all saying, hawk, or eagle, and all taking pictures. The hawk went back to tearing...
2. Consumed by Abstraction
...one another. The stock market. ICE is a bit more complex, or one level more abstracted, in that its principal business is to administrate the sales of derivatives. Derivatives, as...
Lucky Number Seven
...external circumstances can more drastically affect the lives of working-class individuals. At age seven, Sue, Lynn, and Jackie giggle, squirm, and fall all over each other. They lack the composure...
The Impermanence of Beauty Work
...It’s not quite flow, because I think of that as being more about being engaged in the activity itself. While I might be thinking a little bit about, say, whether...
Death Immortalized
...galactic scale -- we ought to be able to detect. The idea of the Fermi Paradox, in brief, is that if our ideas about how common life is in the...
City Under Siege
...Cities Under Siege with a chapter about “countergeographies” that might be created to overturn this new military urbanism. The discussion comes a bit late in the game—on the order of...
Reparative compulsions
...effect: The activity distills these aspects of life into their elementary forms (namely, risk-based interaction, actuarial economic thinking, and compressed, elastic time) and applies them to a course of action...
Family Planning
...of Planned Parenthood, in a 1922 pamphlet entitled “The Woman Rebel.” It has stayed with us as a popular bit of anti-abortionist propaganda, illuminating the supposedly depraved underpinnings of family...
Beauty Blogosphere, Ides of March
..."I was wearing my second-nicest tights and a bit of makeup and holding a recorder, and hence appeared old enough and professionally polished enough to be someone they felt the...