March 2012

The Simpsons, 20th Century Fox From Triple Canopy: Before Facebook and Twitter became avenues for advertising ourselves and our careers, before Internet dating became not only acceptable but preferable to the alternatives, before so much of our social and professional lives came to be conducted on the Web, social...

Mark Perry, the founder of one of the earliest punk fanzines Sniffin' Glue, has said, “Although was entirely connected to the hippy politics, it was entirely the natural progression of hippies' 'anti-establishmentism,' I think. You couldn't wear bells and flowers to freak the powers out anymore and there...

Anita Desai by James Warner In The Artist of Disappearance, Anita Desai meditates on the private and fragile nature of the creative act. Her nostalgic visions of India are also parables of the self’s search for authenticity. Anita Desai’s work has often shown us the remnants of a glorious...

Peoples Library, Zuccotti Park. Photograph by David Shankbone by Barbara Fister In 2011, American libraries fought for the right to do what they had done in the past: share books and information. Over the past ten years, scholarship has been massively privatized; library access to journals is now almost...

The other night I was with friends, enjoying a relaxing evening of Chinese takeout and a wine that was far too expensive to go with it, while we started watching favorite YouTube videos. One of them is Ricky Gervais’ take on Noah’s Ark

by Carl Wennerlind When the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza received word of a successful transmutation of lead into gold in December of 1666, he quickly sought to quell his skepticism by personally visiting the adept, and the visit left him fully convinced of the veracity of the adept’s account....

In the waning decades of the 20th century, my wife and I, then recent Ph.D.s, moved thirteen times in six years. This was hardly an itinerant lifestyle compared to highly mobile hunters and gatherers like the Ache of Paraguay who reportedly moved fifty times annually, but thanks to the...

The Theatre, LSE, c.1930. Photograph from LSE Library Collection From The Times Literary Supplement: In London, Robbins had experienced Keynes’s less attractive side. They had both been appointed to the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, which was intended to find answers to the severe economic downturn then under...

From The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda Softworks, 2011 From The New Inquiry: You can die in Skyrim in the same way that you can die in all videogames, as a fleeting inconvenience for having lost a sword fight, a small technicality. Once dead you reset to the last...

A smart friend, who nonetheless doesn’t often find time to read for pleasure, asked me recently if I had read any Chuck Palahniuk before. I sure have. And for whatever reason, the question of where to get started with this specific author is one that I’ve been asked quite...

Berliner Ensemble production of The Life of Galileo, 1971 From The Nation: A right thumb, a finger, a tooth. These were the contents of a reliquary acquired several years ago by a collector at an auction in Florence. Little did he know that for centuries the remains had been...

Richard Nixon by Michael A. Moodian The structure of the best tragedy should be not simple but complex and one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity—for that is peculiar to this form of art. —Aristotle in Poetics (335 BCE/1932, sec. 1452b) On September 29, 1945, Republican businessman Herman...

Marilynne Robinson From Bookforum: In her novels and in her nonfiction essays, Marilynne Robinson‘s questions are always roughly the same: Who are we, and where did we come from? The first is a matter of metaphysics, the second of history. At least since the publication of her first collection...

So why are we in Europe going down the path of a deeply self-deceptive and hypocritical race to the bottom, where trans-European solidarity is a non-starter, since it can only be a barrier to a European political elite now intent on pursuing the next phase of our liberalization by...

Uebermalte Fotografien, Gerhard Richter, 2005 From N+1: It was obvious from my very first day that Sotheby’s would be exactly as I had come to imagine it. As the elevator reached each floor, archetypes spilled forth. Tweedy men got off at Rare Books, preppies at Impressionism, former sorority pledges...

The Poor Poet, Carl Spitzweg, 1839 From The New York Review of Books: Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders? Does this state of affairs make any difference to what gets written? … A natural selection process favors those...

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia From Boston Review: About two weeks after the failed mass protests, Chas Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, gave a lecture at the Asia Business Forum in Riyadh. He unequivocally asserted that there is no great power other than the United States capable...

There is a moment in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Masculin Feminin in which the character played by a young and brilliant Jean-Pierre Léaud claims that one day at home while eating mashed potatoes his father discovered why the earth goes round the sun.