October 2017
‘Pain relief usually ends up at opioid analgesics’
The notion that your doctor knows best, and will make decisions about your treatment with little attention to your desires, has been out of fashion for decades.
Read MoreUber, Deleted
For about three months this year, I drove an Uber taxi in London (as research for a book about the company). My entry into this world of casual employment was greeted by reams of pseudo-emancipatory rhetoric.
Read More‘We were subversives, a little suspect, a little uncomfortable’
I am not the only woman who worked at Playboy and kept her clothes on. When I was hired as literary editor in 2005...
Read MoreHomage to Democracy
Carles Puigdemont, President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, in 2016. Photograph by Generalitat de Catalunya. From EUROPP: The secessionist parties’ reaction has been to use their small majority in the Catalan parliament to pass a law that makes the constitution null and void. This is not an exaggeration; it is there...
Read MoreCorruption, It’s Bad
Having set off for Moscow after a dinner with friends, the hero awakens outside of Kolpino from an intolerable rocking. Seeing in front of him the windshield bespattered with vomit.
Read More‘We have not yet abandoned the citadels that the modernists established’
In the tumultuous period that began in the late 1910s and ended in the late 1940s, poet-critics began to consolidate their cultural gains by making a durable place for literary modernism in the American social order.
Read MoreResidents of Reality
‘Postmodernity’ has a history. It came not from nowhere, but rather from ‘modernity,’ which in Europe historians have traditionally dated from the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment.
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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