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Djerba, photograph by Judah Passow, 1986 by Nomi Stone On an island off the coast of Tunisia, on the periphery of the Jewish village of the Hara Kebira, three Jewish teenage girls in bathrobes and slippers pass through a gauzy curtain to visit Nisreen, a, the Muslim hairdresser. The...

The cluster of ideas, meanings, and implications associated with Web 2.0 has been amalgamating for the better part of a decade, steadily consolidating to the point where few would deny its cultural significance.

What is work? Why do we work? How is work valued? These questions are fundamental to any human society...

Béatrice, a Franco-Belgian expatriate, lives in the gated community of Stanley Knoll, named after the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, in a house that overlooks Hong Kong Bay.

by Susan Fox Rogers When I moved to the Hudson Valley from the desert southwest, where I had made my home for five years, I knew I would miss those wide western skies—a cliché, I know, but a good one—under which I could hike for hours and not see...

Can the upper class speak? There are signs that it cannot. Maybe this sounds silly, but if you are still in the market for a future for literary criticism, the accurate description of what the upper-class sounds and looks like might be a good place to start.

Books & Books, Gibbs M. Smith From Lapham’s Quarterly: When we speak of literature, we should not imagine that we are speaking of some stable and enduring Platonic entity. The history of literature has always been about its highly mutable institutions, whether bookstores, publishers, schools of criticism, or, for...

Vase by Janet Leach, c. 1980 by Peter Betjemann Consider what comes first to mind when one thinks about handcrafted ceramics. I myself would venture that many people’s initial vision of a handmade vase would involve some aspect of irregularity: perhaps a bold one-of-a-kind design, an imperfectly round rim,...

From The Morning News: The first thing I didn’t write about quitting Facebook was a status update to my friends saying, I’m quitting Facebook. I also did not write a proposal for the nonfiction book I imagined, which was about quitting Facebook. In the book, I would indulge the...

In 1909, after a six-day journey from Vienna with his associates Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud arrived in New York Harbor and spent a week sightseeing in the city. He had traveled to America to give a series of lectures on his “talking cure” at Clark University...

by Eli S. Evans Joseba Elola’s long, scraggly hair, dark beard, and mottled features give him the look of the kind of guy you might find smoking hash in a plaza or drinking first coffee and then beer all day long inside a smoke-filled restaurant in the fashionably run-down...

Why, I asked, had collective violence more or less disappeared from the streets of American cities? Alienation, marginalization, youth unemployment and distrust of the police – these, surely, were as prevalent in American cities as in urban France.

by Serkan Gorkemli In 2007, Kaos GL, a bimonthly publication of the Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association in Ankara, Turkey, devoted its November/December issue to “Turkiye’nin Gay Ikonlari” (Turkey’s Gay Icons). The magazine surveyed readers and published a list of the ten most popular gay...

The Badlands, Philadelphia, Daniel Sandoval by Eric Schneider A few miles from my house lies a block of abandoned row homes, fronts tightly sealed against vandals, which appear to be inhabited only by pigeons and the occasional rodent. But looks are deceiving, and the call of free bleach kits...

Once the bull has burned a bit of energy, the matador performs a series of the close passes of the sort images of which we have all seen if nowhere else painted onto the wall of some hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant somewhere...

Like almost everyone who was a teenager in the early 1980s, when the Music Television network first went live on cable, I wanted my MTV.