February 2011

The term “social contract” has a deep history in political theory...

The last (1944) batch of the Indian Civil Service in Dehra Dun, Ghulam Nabi Kazi by Claude Markovits Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, by Sukanya Banerjee, Durham: Duke University Press, 272 pp. Nationalist teleologies often result in the erasure of significant moments and movements, because the latter...

Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway in Mad Men, AMC From The New York Review of Books: Mad Men keeps telling you what to think instead of letting you think for yourself. As I watched the first season, the characters and their milieu were so unrelentingly repellent that I kept wondering...

Illustration by Matt Kish by Sean D. Kelly My in-box has been flooded, and I know Bert’s has too, with e-mails from readers of All Things Shining.  It’s wonderful!  I only wish we could respond to each of you individually.  Unfortunately, that would be a full-time job, and we’ve...

Henry J. Fair, December 2005 From Environment 360: Human population will approach ten billion within the century. We spread our man-made ecosystems, including “mega-regions” with more than 100 million inhabitants, as landscapes characterized by heavy human use — degraded agricultural lands, industrial wastelands, and recreational landscapes — become characteristic...

Vaclav Havel’s Leaving, performed at The Wilma Theatre, Philadephlia, 2010 From World Affairs: No matter how moral, humble, and immune to the temptations of power you are, once you’ve had it, it’s impossible to ever be free of it. It comes to define you as much in its absence...

Call of Duty 2, Activision, 2005 From Kill Screen: The Call of Duty series represents the extreme forward guard of “hyperrealism” and technological might in contemporary game design. It’s a bombastic, McBay take on American foreign policy. Parents, commentators, and critics look on in horror as frenzied gamers lap...

From Deutsche Welle: Deutsche Welle: “There’s Nothing Wrong with Lucy” is based on the true story of a man you defended, who was accused of sexually abusing one of his daughters… I wonder if your career as a lawyer, which has always been in your second language, made it...

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Paramount Pictures, 1986 From The Paris Review: My husband and I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) the other night. He’d never seen it before, to the consternation of his Facebook friends, and I last saw it a decade ago, when I remember having been...

  Cover Art for The Library of Babel, Erik Desmazières, 2000 From The Times Literary Supplement: Jorge Luis Borges was an eminently portable writer. He favoured various forms, but everything he produced was brief. He once claimed that his reluctance to publish novels was due to laziness, and that his...

Original art by Whitney Garner by Anne Boyer I spend a lot of time at a pharmacy which is also a bookstore and at which a prominent scholar tells me a global ethnomusicologist to whom I have for a long time only been very scarcely connected via the Internet...

Photograph by Phil Douglis From London Review of Books: In the case of real estate, it might happen – as it has – that more building and selling of houses has been financed than can actually be paid for with income deriving, in the last instance, from production. So...

Marilyn Monroe and Charlie McCarthy by Joyelle McSweeney I’ve been thinking through a theory of Anachronism lately. My thinking goes that Art is a kind of Anachronism, breaking into, collapsing, and convulsing conventional ‘straight’ time with media, and, reflexively, turning conventional chronology into a kind of medium for convulsive,...

The Greatest Japanese Writer You’ve Never Heard of | by Damion Searls,

The Quarterly Conversation

Tun-huang has been an important city for millennia, on the Chinese end of the silk road, and the nearby Mogao Grottoes or Thousand Buddha Caves...