The Annunciation, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898 From Belief: Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism and the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. [1] I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I…
Read MoreJanet Groth at The New Yorker. Via by Joe Linker The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker, by Janet Groth, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 229 pp. The receptionist receives. Receives what? An education, a memoir. One purpose of a memoir, a narrative of memory, might be to raise eyebrows, for it’s a tool…
Read MoreNew York Stock Exchange. Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images by Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein As ProPublica has been detailing for two years, Wall Street banks and the hedge fund Magnetar worked together to build mortgage-backed deals that the hedge fund also bet against. The more than $40 billion of deals helped fuel the crash of…
Read MoreLovers, Egon Schiele, 1914 by James Warner Heavenly Breakfast (1979) is a confessedly idealized account of a Lower East Side Manhattan commune that lasted through the winter of 1967-1968 — Delany writes, “At the Breakfast I learned to move within the circle of other people’s desire, and be at ease as I generated my own.…
Read MoreElisabeth Badinter by Cécile Alduy Forget Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Naomi Wolf. Descartes gave us all that we needed to claim gender equality a long time ago. Historians rarely remember it this way, but women’s rights were dramatically (if hypothetically) advanced when, in 1619, René Descartes, snow-bound in a stove-heated room in Neuberg,…
Read MoreIgnacio Rabago by Peter Suber We all understand why free online music sharing is controversial. Musicians make a living by selling their work, and widespread unauthorized sharing could slash their revenue. File sharers respond with evidence that obscurity is more costly than piracy, for those below the rank of superstar, and that unauthorized online sharing…
Read More“Alice sitting between Gryphon and Mock turtle”, John Tenniel, 1865. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865. by Albena Azmanova The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929…
Read MorePense Bête, Marcel Broodthaers, 1964 Choir Similar to the attention like I say to him similar to the identical. He concludes. He remains to resemble and such. Chambers without table or wall. Chambers with a sun entirely. Then the children show that the sun is entire. As if I find myself right now. Similar to…
Read Moreby Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei It is not my intention to offer the following notes pertaining to one part of the series Narration d’équilibre [Narrative of equilibrium], written by the poet, translator, photographer, encyclopedist, and radio maker Jean Daive (1941), as a meticulous overview of the different themes, lines, and figures traversing such a…
Read Moreby Joanna Freer Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, by Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise, University Of Delaware, 320 pp. In Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day, characters rove all over the known world and, indeed, beyond, discovering hidden realms and involving themselves in political conflicts, obscure mysticisms and mathematical debates. Given its…
Read MorePiece originally published at Public Domain Review. A selection of the more inventive entries to a competition to design a new tower for London. The year previous, 1889, saw the hugely successful Eiffel Tower go up in the centre of Paris, and the good people of London, not to be outdone, decided to get one…
Read Moreby Gregory Jusdanis I got a new lesson on the force of narrative during the blackout that affected much of the mid-west and east coast in early July. It was the third time our own neighborhood had experienced an extended power outage in four years. This time, however, the temperatures soared to the 100F mark…
Read MorePaulo Afonso Hydroelectric Powerplant in the State of Bahia, Brazil by David L. Levy Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy, by Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 222 pp. Can capitalism effectively respond to climate change? This is the timely and critically important question posed by Peter…
Read Moreby Maggie Koerth-Baker From a public perspective, biology in the oceans, like biology on the land, tends to favor the charismatic megafauna. Stop by your local aquarium and you’ll find masses huddled around the seal pool or the shark tank. People will even attempt to interact with the octopodes. Meanwhile, smaller creatures sit on the…
Read MoreBrothers Abdullah (L) and Umut Tagi, winners of the national Best Herring award. Leiden, Netherlands, 2012 by Markha Valenta The accounts, symbols and feelings that we have about national identity were largely imagined, created and popularized in the nineteenth century. The word ‘nationalism’ itself dates from the early nineteenth century and marked the increasing use…
Read MoreTranslated by Brian Reed From its breast the mountain now shakes its misty khalat. With morning namaz the field, spiked golden, roars. The forest bows and from its May-tresses pours, As from a khalifah’s rosary, ruby and garnet. The meadow’s all flowers. Over it flowers float, A rainbow scythe, butterflies of many colors. They–a diamond…
Read MorePortrait of Swinburne by William Scott Bell, painted in 1860 when Swinburne was just 23 years old, 6 years before he’d publish his first book of poems. by Julian Barnes Piece originally published at Public Domain Review. In the first half of the 19th century, the British began to discover Normandy. Previously, the point of…
Read Moreby Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear – George Orwell Learning from Orwell is maybe even more important today than it was 70 years ago. Here I will try to tell why. I will use just facts from one country that is ruled by…
Read MoreLa rue Félix Faure, Nancy. Photograph by Dalbera by Jean-Michel Rabaté My title assumes that the reader knows what “the Nancy School” is. In fact, there is more than one. I will mention at least three. There is the school, celebrated at the Museum of the Nancy School, that we associate with Art Nouveau, with…
Read MoreL-R: David Mamet and Gilad Atzmon by James Warner Reading Gilad Atzmon’s The Wandering Who? immediately after David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, I was surprised to find the two books, written from vehemently opposed political viewpoints, nonetheless reminded me of each other. Does Mamet’s need to see the Israelis only as scapegoats grow from the…
Read More
