April 2011

Goldeneye, Rare, 1997 by Daniel Reynolds Video games tend to channel their players down spatial and behavioral paths. The virtual worlds of games are constructions and, as such, they necessarily have ultimate boundaries. The internal boundaries and barriers of games work to contain players in certain ways. Depending on...

The Death and Life of Great New York Novels | by Tom LeClair

Barnes and Noble Review

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of The Death and Life of Great American Cities  , Jane Jacobs's groundbreaking and ground-revealing book that still influences...

From The Chronicle Review: Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx’s ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of...

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, Joseph Wright, c. 1768 (on show at the National Museum of China) From The Art Newspaper: Imagine you are a rising global superpower of 1.3bn people. You have spent three decades ramping up a $5 trillion economy and upgrading your...

The Hurt Locker, Summit Entertainment, 2008 by Stacey Peebles War stories have been with us forever, but at some points in human history they demand our attention more urgently than at others. Now would seem to be one of those times, as the United States remains deeply engaged in...

From London Review of Books: How to sum up Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, that emblematic figure of our times, with his doctorate from the LSE (‘The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions’), his charitable foundations, his extensive property portfolio, his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection...

Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Evans-Wentz  by Donald S. Lopez Jr. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography is part of a new series from Princeton University Press called “Lives of Great Religious Books.” The volumes in the series describe the origins and legacies of some of the...

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test Scorer | by Dan DiMaggio

Monthly Review

Standardized testing has become central to education policy in the United States. After dramatically expanding in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, testing has been further...

From The New Yorker: After Rosenberg heard that the Musas had been shot, he rushed to the scene. Luis Mendizábal, a longtime friend and client of Rosenberg’s, told me, “I asked him to come and pick me up, so we could go to the place together. He said, ‘No,...

An Idle Moment, John White Alexander, c. 1885 From Lapham’s Quarterly: Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn’t sway toward the thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like...

Su Chun Zhang From Stanford Medicine: On the surface it seems easy. Overseas stem cell “clinics” peddling unproven treatments to desperate and dying patients, charging tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being injected with mysterious concoctions of cells meant to cure almost every ailment: What’s not...

by Sharon Krause Why do we have human rights and why are we obligated to respect them? This question provokes a certain amount of anxiety among theorists of human rights today. The difficulties of justifying human rights in the context of what one commentator has called “a world of...