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Hip hop is a fundamentally subversive genre. It has become a universal medium of social and political expression for young, dissident, and marginalized people everywhere. What Arabic hip hop has given the Arab world is a widely-accessible and unfiltered medium for disseminating revolutionary ideas.

From The Paris Review: Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually-defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth-century who coined the word “pornography.” So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most...

Bryan Cranston as Walter White, Breaking Bad, AMC by William Egginton In a recent NPR piece TV critic Eric Deggans cites shows like “Hell on Wheels,” Sons of Anarchy,” “Dexter,” and “Breaking Bad” as evidence of a proliferations of television programs featuring “characters the audience likes and wants to...

Kim Kardashian and Mario Lopez in H8R From The Believer: Last year’s short-lived reality show, succinctly entitled H8R (if you can’t decipher that idiom, you are too old to be watching the program), followed celebrities like Snooki and Kim Kardashian as they confronted people who’d said mean things about...

scienceforseo.com by Massimo Pigliucci A recent piece by Scott Jaschik in “Inside Higher Education” pointed out what a number of my colleagues have been thinking for a while now: the peer review system for scholarly journals doesn’t work very well, needs to be reformed, and really ought to take...

I dreamt last night that weight was bread. More precisely, I dreamt that a kilogram was a loaf of dark, rye-like, round bread, about the diameter of a steering wheel.

The Jinhua caves are located in a wooded, hilly area about 200 miles southwest of Shanghai. The most famous cave, Double Dragon Cave, is entered by a stream that passes under a stone overhang just a few inches above the water.

Late in 2010, Google Labs introduced something called the NGram Viewer, which allows users to search a database of millions of published works and discover how often particular words have been used from year to year.

Bill Gates in The Simpsons, Fox Broadcasting Company From London Review of Books: How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software...

by Elena Strelnikova It’s an age-old adage that things always look greener on the other side of the fence and this is particularly true of married women looking at single women’s life and vice versa. My colleague and I have taken up sport. We go swimming and we run...

Kim Hyesoon From Guernica: Guernica: In an interview with Don Mee Choi, you said, “To live as a woman poet in Korea means to occupy a marginal place, a mere ‘spice’ within a world of poetry constructed by men.” Is it merely tradition that pushes women poets to the...

The writers and editors at The Paris Review, 1955 From The New York Times: In the winter of 1954 my wife, Barbara, and I spent a few weeks in a grand, gloomy Paris apartment amid scratched and faded 18th-century furniture and silken walls at 35 Rue de la Faisanderie,...

Until recently, I’d open my copy of Franz Kafka’s Amerika and powdered milk would sift out. I carried that book in my pack for six months through the South Pacific.

In many parts of Madagascar they have this idea that dead kings continue to exist and possess people and retain all their authority. As a result, as Gillian Feeley-Harnik wrote, the Sakalava on the West Coast, could insist that the ultimate authorities in the colonial period were these old...

The Spice Girls by Rahila Gupta Feminism needs to recapture the state from the neo-liberal project to which it is in hock in order to make it deliver for women. It must guard against atomisation and recover its transformative aspirations to shape the new social order that is hovering...

Near Land’s End in Cornwall, the westernmost point of the island of Great Britain, where the rocks and cliffs of terra firma put up a heroic resistance to the incessant waves of the Atlantic, the landscape ends with some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet.