Precarious Verse
...of speech but that of poetry, speech transfigured by communion with music, notes sounded in clear vowels. Poetry as speech transfigured — which is to say, speech elevated above merely...
Why We Love Sociopaths
...evening news. On a certain level, this trend may not seem like anything new. It seems as though most cultures have lionized ruthless individuals who make their own rules, even...
Collateral Damage
...means to be a writer in the precarious economy and how it has changed the nature of written culture and book reviewing. *** Willie Osterweil: One thing I’d like to...
Nostalgia for the Future
...he packed my bag of DVDs, that I do not pay for it. Early Palestinian cinema and its consequent visual culture sought to give, to the world, an image of...
Nerd Crushed: Where Are the Average-Looking Female "Sex Symbols"?
...with nerd culture in the sense that they go to Comic Con. Then there are the women who have been christened as “the thinking man’s sex symbol,” like Tina Fey,...
Centuries in Sorry
Reparations begin in the body
Dry Bones Breathe
...all the glories and contradictions of black culture, religions and politics. There’s a record of the black struggle over the course of the 20th century, a tension between the South...
The Ahmeds in America, Part I
...in terms of Islam as religion - not culture, not politics, not music, not poetry - just Islam. And that too, a particular kind of religion - one that obsesses...
The Ahmeds in America, Part One
...Islam as religion - not culture, not politics, not music, not poetry - just Islam. And that too, a particular kind of religion - one that obsesses over the veil,...
Cartooning the Body
...a child’s supposedly passive consumption of whatever content is aimed at them, cartoons trace a political horizon defined by the profound absence of alternative possibilities. Within the globalized consumer culture,...
Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of "Free Speech"
...we understand and describe ourselves to have a common social interest in promoting, protecting, or criminalizing something. Legal culture not only describes how and where the actual law is enforced—such...
Five Questions with Nikki Giovanni
...It has no economic potential. Culture is culture and business is business! Didn't you know that? Which inimical public figures or institutions would exclaim ‘Culture is culture and business is...
Work, Supermodel
madison moore’s new book, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, centers the present history of black and brown queer ballroom culture
Next Year in Tehran
...Israel came only two years after the release of his seminal work, Westoxification (also translated as “Occidentosis”), a condemnation of the invasion of Western culture under the Pahlavi regime and...
Woody Allen’s Good Name
...start by assuming she’s lying,” except in a rape culture, and if you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured. It works both ways, or...
Praying in The Closet
...countercultural energy, Are You Running doesn’t fit easily into our common categories of how queer sexuality, mainstream Christianity, and popular culture typically intersect. It’s not lavishly excessive; it’s not homophobic;...