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…
Read MoreBjarnaflag Geothermal Power Station and Diatomite Factory, Reykjahlid, Iceland From Sign and Sight: “In Iceland the politicians promised to deliver 30 terrawatt hours of energy in an environmentally sustainable manner. So everyone immediately thinks, oh, that is scientific, rational and probably true. In doing so, they wanted to sell all the rivers of Iceland to…
Read Moreby A. Staley Groves 1. St. Reagan and the Return of the Storyteller The 2004 Republican National Convention was a significant event concerning language and aesthetics in contemporary politics. The Reagan myth appeared as a stellar aura of sentimentality that churned a cultic swoon. Among the polity this spectacular mystery passed a glow upon the…
Read MoreKristina Söderbaum as Äls in The Great Sacrifice, Veit Harlan, 1944 by Christelle Le Faucheur Nazi Cinema’s New Women, by Jana Francesca Bruns, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 271 pp. Bruns’s book represents an attempt to answer some of the major questions concerning the Third Reich’s functioning and longevity. Following other scholars, the author focuses on the regime’s use…
Read MoreBird’s eye view of Central Park, New York, John Bachman, 1859 by Katy Layton-Jones Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century, by Heath Massey Schenker, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 232 pp. At the end of a decade during which urban green space ascended the hierarchy of public and political priorities, it is worth noting…
Read Moreby Gregory Freidin Awarded the Jury’s Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s “Elena” is a powerful cinematic fete, as distinct and subtle as his 2003 prize-winning “The Return,” but one whose story carries a greater resonance and depth. A small masterpiece, it will be appreciated by a thinking audience, one…
Read MoreMIT researcher Skylar Tibbits works on self-assembly – the idea that instead of building something (a chair, a skyscraper), we can create materials that build themselves, much the way a strand of DNA zips itself together. Tibbits shows us three in-the-lab projects that hint at what a self-assembling future might look like. About the…
Read MoreA panoramic view of the big city from the hillside Parc de Belleville. Far from the picturesque quais of the Seine and the chic quarters to the west, a neighborhood of small, deteriorating houses was destroyed to create this park in 1988, but some semblance of a neighborly “village” lives on in streets and cafés…
Read MoreZellig Harris by Robert F. Barsky I began corresponding with Noam Chomsky in the late 1980s, on a range of issues that concerned me as a young graduate student studying language and literature, but interested in human rights and the history of radical movements. From the very beginning, my letters to him were personal, in…
Read MorePortrait of Arnold Schoenburg, Egon Schiele, 1917 by Sabine Feisst Arnold Schoenberg, the famous Viennese-born composer and pioneer of musical modernism, was one of the many refugees from Nazi tyranny who settled in the United States in the 1930s and never again set foot on European soil. Yet despite his eighteen fruitful years (1933-1951) in…
Read MoreFrom Boston Review: On April 3, 2011, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by police just prior to boarding a flight to Hong Kong. He has been held incommunicado since. [Ed. note: He was released on June 22, after this article went to press.] Ai—known internationally as much for his far-ranging artistic projects as his…
Read MoreZoe Saldana during the making of Avatar, 20th Century Fox, 2009 From Eurozine: As Giorgio Agamben has argued, cinema is an art of the gesture, since it is an important part of an age of modernity where gestures are transformed by industrial machines. Nervous illnesses and gestural hiccups abound in early cinema – the emblematic…
Read MoreFrom Eurozine: Transit: In 1982 you were arrested and charged with anti-Soviet activities. Looking back today, how do you see the events of 30 years ago? What is your assessment of the intellectual legacy of the dissident movement? Gleb Pavlovsky: I see it as a forgotten experience. The period from the late 1970s to early…
Read MoreBoasting a scandalous history, Joyce’s novel is famous for the controversy it caused when it was serialized in the Little Review…
Read Moreby Ed Yong Erez Lieberman Aiden is a talkative witty fellow, who will bend your ear on any number of intellectual topics. Just don’t ask him what he does. “This is actually the most difficult question that I run into on a regular basis,” he says. “I really don’t have anything for that.” It is…
Read MoreChris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman as Thor and Jane Foster, Thor, Paramount Pictures, 2011 by David A. Kirby For most people, the start of the summer blockbuster season would not be an ideal time to be examining movies for their scientific verisimilitude. Big, silly popcorn flicks are about explosions, muscled men in tights fighting CGI creatures,…
Read MoreJon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as Joe Buck and Enrico Rizzo, Midnight Cowboy, United Artists, 1969 by Jason Narlock New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America, by Barry Reay, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 279 pp. One of the most enduring legacies of the lesbian and gay rights movement in the twentieth century has been…
Read MoreSocialism is an old idea. The ideas and movements that can be subsumed under the term, encompassing a plethora of radical or moderate shades, have shaped the course of human history over the last two hundred years.
Read MoreAfghan Mujahideen with surface to air stinger missile, near Jalalabad, 1989, Steve McCurry by Dan Caldwell The development and advancement of technology has influenced reform and revolution throughout history, but arguably never more so than during the last three decades in the Middle East. The recent “Facebook revolutions” are the current manifestations of this trend.…
Read MoreRound structures, Site PVN306, Naco Valley by Edward M. Schortman and Patricia A. Urban A debate that has long fascinated us concerns the ways in which political relations emerge from, and are sustained by, daily interactions among individuals of all ranks. The traditional approach in our discipline, archaeology, has tended to stress the out-sized roles of elites…
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