July 2011

The myconymic apprenticeship would serve as a point of access to human existence...

The Beer Archaeologist | by Abigail Tucker

Smithsonian

The ancients were liable to spike their drinks with all sorts of unpredictable stuff—olive oil, bog myrtle, cheese, meadow­sweet, mugwort, carrot, not to mention hallucinogens like hemp and poppy...

“Ahem!” said the Mouse, with an important air, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Charles Robinson, 1907 From Threepenny Review: It may be that Carroll’s tale has deeper roots in the human psyche than its nursery reputation might suggest. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not...

From Image Text: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing #40, “The Curse,” is a product of the complex history of race relations within the feminist movement. It presented a powerful portrait of the experience of women living under patriarchy to a mostly male audience of comic book readers. This audience, most...

by Madhavi Menon Surprisingly, queer theorists have rarely encountered Shakespeare. Not because they are badly-read or have blinkers on, but because of a deep belief that Shakespeare existed “before” the days of queer theory, and so it would be anachronistic to put the one in conversation with the other....

CBGB, New York by James Warner Jennifer Egan’s fiction asks whether our experience is now technologically mediated to the point that we routinely mistake the map for the territory. In her book A Visit from the Goon Squad, she evokes a world where the pressure constantly to self-reinvent threatens...

Recently there has been a flowering of interest among philosophers, but also psychologists and neuroscientists, in the nature of our perception and appreciation of tastes and smells and in the pre-eminent complex human artefact constituted of them, wine...

Offense Taken | by Bruce Fleming

The Berlin Review of Books

Proposing anal sex to someone, for example, is not the same as using the words “anal sex” in a classroom discussion as one topic of publicly unacceptable jokes—such as I did...

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lee Holloway, Secretary, Lionsgate Entertainment, 2002 From The Smart Set: There are mistresses, and there are homewreckers. We often believe that the only thing distinguishing one from the other is revelation. The mistress is the hidden, secret lover, but the homewrecker is the same woman splashed...

A Greek epic poem in four books about the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece, the Argonautika was written in Alexandria...