Work, Ford Maddox Brown, 1852–1865 by David Palumbo-Liu In its March 2013 issue, The Atlantic ran a tersely titled article, “Anthropology, Inc.” The author, Graeme Wood, spoke about a market research company (ReD) that was hiring anthropology PhDs to use their training in social science field work to dreg up data closer to home—in fact, in…
Read Moreby Joe Linker “The idea that everyone has a story to tell (which underlies the notion that anyone can write since all a writer needs is a story) is strictly correct,” Jenny Diski said, writing in the London Review of Books (7 Mar, 21) about Marco Roth’s memoir, The Scientists: A Family Romance. Well, Henry…
Read MorePoster by Cea. by Artemy Troitsky, Peter Pomerantsev and Oliver Carroll Russia’s 1968? Oliver Carroll: From Voina to Bykov, Pussy Riot to Moscow hipsterism, culture seems to be playing a very political game in Russia. How can we explain this? Is this something that Russia has seen before? Are we witnessing this Russia’s ‘1968’ moment?…
Read MoreThe Flood, Vilmos Aba-Novák, 1923 by Gregory Jusdanis No, she insisted, she could never go back to Zanesville. Of course, she would continue to visit her hometown but she would not live there again. My student’s words were adamant but her voice broke with undisguised sadness. I stared at her as the sun flooded the…
Read MoreThe Farm Animals, Marcel Broodthaers, 1974 by Anders Pettersson Reconsidering the Postmodern: European Literature beyond Relativism, edited by Thomas Vaessens and Yra van Dijk, Amsterdam University Press, 322 pp. Through this collection of articles, Thomas Vaessens and Yra van Dijk attempt to gauge the current state of postmodern literature in Europe. Besides an important introduction…
Read MoreAnnunciation, Sandro Botticelli, 1489 – 1490 by Rahila Gupta The narrative of splits in Protestantism which is based on convenient binaries, with African and Asian churches emerging as the conservatives, and the US and Europe as the liberals, fails to capture the complexity of what is going on at ground level. Given the rise of…
Read MoreL-R: Jean Harlow and Anita Loos promoting Red-Headed Woman, 1932 by Elyse Graham When James Joyce was nearly blind and working on the first draft of Finnegans Wake, the book he permitted himself during his daily reading window was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a best-selling satire by Anita Loos. [1] The book has the interest of…
Read MoreThomas Merton by Joe Linker What is prayer? When I was a kid, I learned the Catholic prayers, and believed Sister Mary Annette, who liked to quote Shakespeare, when she said, “Words without thought never to heaven go.” King Claudius is trying to pray, looks like he is praying, to Hamlet, anyway, and so Hamlet…
Read Moreby Massimo Pigliucci The “Darwinian” theory of evolution is here to stay. I used the scare quotes to refer to it in the previous sentence because the current incarnation, known as the Modern Synthesis (and incorrectly referred to as “neo-Darwinism,” which actually was an even earlier version) is significantly more sophisticated and encompassing than the…
Read MoreThe Death of Hippolytus, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1860 Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate,…
Read MoreJames Joyce, Man Ray, 1922 by Juliet Flower MacCannell In his twenty-third seminar, Jacques Lacan framed the sinthome as a radical unknotting of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. He offered le sinthome not as a mere technical addition to the battery of psychoanalytic tools, but as a concept of paramount importance, for its…
Read More“Anthony: What Is the Point of All This? The Devil: There Is No Point!”, by Odilon Redon from his “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” series – Source. by Colin Dickey Piece originally published at Public Domain Review. In the fall of 1849, Gustave Flaubert invited his two closest friends—Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp—to hear…
Read MoreKathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal at the 85th Academy Awards; screengrabs by X by Russell Bennetts 1. John Barrowman. 2. All-too pertinent news clips are shown in the background of two discussion scenes. 3. Music I listen to for pleasure being used for pain. (I know this happened IRL, but nonetheless.) 4. A song that…
Read Moreby Peter Burleigh Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research- and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop…
Read MoreC. P. Cavafy by Gregory Jusdanis If asked to select a writer to dine with tonight, I would name C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), the Greek poet of Alexandria. I would do this for many reasons but mainly to see his reaction when I tell him that he is one of — if not — the…
Read Moreby Dave Mesing “Together, we might be able to do dangerous subversive things, mischievous things.”1 Such is Andy Merrifield’s opening promise in his recent book Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination. Merrifield situates the work between two poles of people: those who are more or less orthodox Marxists and those who are Marxists but…
Read MoreMina Loy by Christina Walter Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” is a polemic against women’s subordinate position in modern Western culture, penned in 1914 by Anglo-American writer and painter Mina Loy, who was then living in an expatriate community in Florence, Italy. This polemic, unpublished in Loy’s lifetime, is one of her earliest prose works and…
Read Moreby Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Nino Chubinishvili has created her own Alter-Modern world in Tbilisi. She is not a self-described adherent of Deleuzian Multiplicities or Hardt and Negri’s Multitude. She has just created her own world. Sometimes this happens at her own studio in Arts Academy, in some cases in her own house on Mtatsminda region,…
Read MoreBeppe Grillo addresses a crowd in Trieste, February 2013. Photograph by Triesteprima.it by Jamie Mackay Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement has often been called a shake-up for Italian politics. But what if ‘M5S’ really obeyed an established paradigm that is far from the revolutionary ideas it claims to convey? He stepped onto the podium to…
Read MoreThe Cathedral School of Saint John the Divine, New York City. Photograph by Sotti. by Albert Rolls In the essay “Hallowe’en? Over Already?” (1999), Thomas Pynchon writes about some of the fall 1998 goings on at the Cathedral School in New York City, where his son, Jackson, was enrolled in the second grade. They included…
Read More
