August 2011

Starship Troopers, TriStar Pictures, 1997  From The Smart Set: If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas...

Dave Quiggle From Poetry: In March 1970, the poet Ted Hughes found himself in a tricky real estate situation. There was a charming seaside house he wanted to buy, in Devonshire, but the necessary funds weren’t at hand. Of course he could have sold one of his two other...

by Julia James When Stanford visiting scholar Li Cong thinks back to her recent stint surveying villagers in the Anhui province of China, one interviewee in particular springs to mind. He was a middle-aged man, not too rich, who was so desperate to finally wed that he’d spent years...

A panoramic view of the big city from the hillside Parc de Belleville. Far from the picturesque quais of the Seine and the chic quarters to the west, a  neighborhood of small, deteriorating houses was destroyed to create this park in 1988, but some semblance of a neighborly “village”...

The Next Election: The Surprising Reality | by Andrew Hacker

The New York Review of Books

The 2010 election galvanized the GOP. The party won seven new places in the Senate, as many new governorships, and took the seats of 720 Democrats...

From The Simpsons, Fox Broadcasting Company by Amy E. Wendling The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, by Kevin Floyd, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 270 pp. Of the many striking features of Kevin Floyd’s excellent study, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, certainly the most...

The old bridge in Mostar being rebuilt, 2003, photograph by Donar Reiskoffer by Jason Dittmer Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal, by Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Oxford University Press, 488 pp. Bosnia Remade is a book a long time in coming and yet absolutely timely, taking as...

Orinoco River From Lapham’s Quarterly: On June 6, 1800, nearly a year into his scientific journey through South America, Alexander von Humboldt arrived at a mission on the Orinoco River called La Concepción de Uruana. It was a stunning site. The village sat at the foot of granite mountains,...

From Guernica: It’s 1994, and Michael Stipe recently lost his religion. It’s before Bieber and bling, before ordering a latte required six qualifying adjectives. In coffeehouses across the country, bored teens slouch on thrift-store couches nodding along to the Cranberries’ “Zombie.” Weezer breaks into the alt-rock scene with the...

Slaughterhouse 5.5, photograph by Alev Adil From New York Magazine: A cranky ostrich in a rumpled suit, Kurt Vonnegut might seem an odd fit for the staid Library of America. (His advice to young writers? “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”) But Vonnegut, like...

Thelma and Louise wrote their own version of emancipatory feminism...

A GEO Group prison by Loïc Wacquant The increasing penalization of poverty is a response to social insecurity; a result of public policy that weds the “invisible hand” of the market to the “iron fist” of the penal state. How and why has the prison returned to the institutional...

The Catcher in the Rye was released on July 16, 1951 after a ten-year incubation and a contentious publishing process...

Quintessentially No. 8 | by David Elworthy

Landfall Review

Within a decade or two of their first arrival in New Zealand, English-speaking settlers began to note the changes wrought upon their native tongue by their experiences in a new environment – and their...