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The Lion Gate at Mycenae From The Smart Set: Amongst ruins, there is a mood. Wordsworth captured an aspect of that mood in his poem “Tintern Abbey”: And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While...

The Palestra, University of Pennsylvania’s arena in Philadelphia From Projo: For my pilgrimage to West Philly, I needed a spiritual guide, so I turned to John Edgar Wideman, the distinguished novelist and Brown University professor who played brilliant basketball for Penn from 1959 to 1963. But Wideman’s recollections proved...

From Reader’s Almanac: It seems like only a heartbeat ago that Frank Sinatra was ringside at Madison Square Garden, camera in hand, straining to get just the right shot of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier as they went to war for the first time. The calendar tells us, however,...

Amy Chua and her daughters From The Atlantic: Right now, in admissions offices in Cambridge and New Haven and Palo Alto, the teenage children of some of America’s most thoughtful and devoted mothers are coming in for exceptionally close scrutiny—as is, so these women feel, the parenting they have...

by Walter Kirn During a runaway Facebook session recently — on one of those threads that grows its own weird brain and sits up Frankenstein-style from the table and bursts its restraints and goes smashing out of the lab — it occurred to a few of us at once...

by Kate Durbin and Meghan Vicks When Lady Gaga hit the pop culture-scape with “Just Dance” in 2008, her performance was accompanied by the slogan “Pop Music Will Never Be Low Brow,” which was appropriately projected in her video-screen glasses, the first of many props that would celebrate the...

Alien, 20th Century Fox, 1979 by Norah Campbell and Mike Saren Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe,...

Designers like to design. They like to be in charge of all aspects of what they create. Many designers are notoriously control freaks. And rightly so...

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), United Artists, 1972  From Guernica: The first time I successfully masturbated I was eleven and my older brother and his girlfriend were watching Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to...

America’s heroes | by Nick Harkaway

Prospect

We don’t have superheroes in Britain the way they do in the US. John Constantine, the brutal magus anti-hero of DC Comics’ Hellblazer, once observed that Britain is a country where no one would have...