by Gregory Jusdanis The world is text. Mallarmé and Flaubert described this possibility at the end of the nineteenth century and Derrida proclaimed it again more recently. But now we can say that the world is literature. It is turning literary through the Internet. What is taking place today is not, as Oscar Wilde or…
Read Moreby Gregory Jusdanis Are we forcing the world to conform to our own image of it? Are we asking foreign authors to fashion pictures of their societies that fulfill our own perceptions, desires, and fears? I often think of these questions when I read a novel translated into English. Why has this been chosen, I…
Read Moreby Bill Benzon What’s the Road Runner series about? The cartoons adhere to a formula: They’re set in a desert landscape in the southwestern US and have just two characters, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Coyote is hungry; Road Runner is a (potential) meal. Coyote concocts schemes to catch Road Runner; some of these…
Read Moreby Jesse Eisinger It has been noted repeatedly that almost no top bankers have faced serious consequences for their actions in the financial crisis. But there is a Wall Street corollary that might be even more pernicious: Good guys are punished. Whistle-blowers, truth-tellers and fraud-spotters pay a miserable price on Wall Street. They are vilified.…
Read MoreAllen Ginsberg dressed up for working at his Market Research job, Berkely, 1954, Allen Ginsberg Project by Joe Linker When did literature become an elitist game? When we started writing? Literature both reflects and influences culture, society, and the individual, but there are many things that reflect our values (what we want; not to be confused…
Read Moreby Elif Batuman Let’s say you’re writing a book. Every day you get up and think about it and work on it and change it. Then, at some more-or-less arbitrary point (I didn’t realize before I published a book how arbitrary this point is), it’s taken away from you and sent to copy-editors, printers, buyers,…
Read MoreFantasia, Walt Disney Productions, 1940 by Bill Benzon Early in my career I was immersed in the ideas of a handful of Continental thinkers, including Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss, but, as I explained in an essay, about my encounter with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, that poem forced me away from a more or less philosophical…
Read MoreWater for Elephants, Fox 2000 Film, 2011 by Anne Helen Peterson Earlier this week, Lainey Gossip posted a particularly critical reading of Reese Witherspoon’s current publicity attempts, with specific attention to the contradiction between Witherspoon complaining about her lack of privacy and the recent sale of her wedding photos to People and OK! The Witherspoon…
Read Moreby Elif Batuman My new go-to Kindle drunk-dialing author these days is Anthony Powell, whose twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time I cannot over-recommend for those needing to unwind in bed, with or without a drink. When you finish one volume, you press a button, and there’s a new one right there! Eleven…
Read Moreby Sharon Krause Why do we have human rights and why are we obligated to respect them? This question provokes a certain amount of anxiety among theorists of human rights today. The difficulties of justifying human rights in the context of what one commentator has called “a world of difference” have helped to motivate the…
Read MoreJustin Reed by Michael B. Mathias Aristotle commended the poets for their ability to portray the ways in which fate tests character and to display how human weaknesses may be amplified in unusual situations. By depicting human beings caught up in extraordinary circumstances, the poets did not simply entertain; they provided deep insights about human nature.…
Read Moreby Claire B. Potter Clutter Busting: Letting Go of What’s Holding You Back, by Brooks Palmer, California: New World Library, 232 pp. One of the reasons that self-help books are so successful is that they introduce complex thinking to people who aren’t normally exposed to it, or who are made uncomfortable by it. Conversely, self-help…
Read MoreSchool of Athens, Raphael, 1510-1511 Posted by kind permission of James Clifford, this is the text of a talk he delivered at “The University We Are For,” a conference organized by David Theo Goldberg and Wendy Brown at UC Berkeley (11/5/10). The Berkeley forum is webcast here and the UC Irvine version can be…
Read MoreEine DuBarry von Heute, Alexander Korda, 1926 by David B. Clarke The cinema has never shone except by pure seduction, by the pure vibrancy of non-sense – a hot shimmering that is all the more beautiful from having come from the cold. – Baudrillard (1990a, 96) 1. Réalité Vérité Until a difference exists, how can an…
Read Moreby Jake Adelstein with Lisa Katayama Several months ago, I introduced you to Jake Adelstein, the fearless-to-a-fault Jewish-American reporter who spent 12 years as a crime beat reporter in Japan and wrote about it in his book Tokyo Vice. In Tokyo Vice, we meet Adelstein’s arch-nemesis, a former yakuza boss named Tadamasa Goto; we also…
Read MoreIt was a Saturday, eight days before Christmas, the 17th. It seemed just an ordinary day. I got up, went for my usual swim, and decided to go to the cinema, but as soon as the previews started, I became aware of something bizarre happening — a sort of incandescent fluttering to my left, which I took to be a visual migraine.
Read Moreby Daniel Metcalfe Daniel Metcalfe’s book ‘Out of Steppe’ describes his journey through Central Asia. In this excerpt he describes the Karakalpak landscape around the Aral Sea. The Soviet tourist destination, previously the centre of a successful fishing industry, is now depopulated, polluted by the chemicals used to prop up the failing cotton industry and…
Read MoreFollowing David Cameron’s promise of a crackdown on benefit “fraud”, a revolting campaign has been launched in the Sun against “scroungers” and “cheats”. Readers are encouraged to report those they suspect of over-claiming benefits to the Sun who will presumably then expose, humiliate and demonise them as an example to others. Take a look at the…
Read MoreBased on extensive research, including a visit to Fort de Joux, Martineau’s historical romance repeatedly stated the idea of black agency and capability…
Read MoreA house down around the block is getting a new roof, hammers echoing like giant flickers. Since the big virus outbreak…
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