June 2012

"FRANCE HAS A NEW PRESIDENT." It does not look like much of a statement on paper, or on a computer screen: five little words, almost too short for a tweet. But France today is still dazed from the news, floating between disbelief, relief and exhaustion.

Engraving of Cimetiére des Saints-Innocents in Paris, c.1550 by Peter Johnson In Foucault’s lecture to architects, the cemetery is the most prevalent and thoroughly discussed example of heterotopia and yet it has been virtually ignored in most interpretations of the concept. He mentions the cemetery explicitly in relation to...

“One of the saddest things is that I go and talk to artists and dancers etc. and they expect that because I can tell them something about brain correlates, then I can tell them something more profound about what it is they do!”, Iain McGilchrist tells me. “And I...

Even people with no interest in field guides know about them...

Wladimir Klitschko and Jean-Marc Mormeck in the WBA-IBF Heavyweight titles, Düsseldorf, March 2012 by Àngel Ferrero In the amorality of capitalism, the alternatives for an emigrant are virtually reduced to cynicism or melancholy. Cigarette smoke snuck into clothes and wreathed tables, chairs, and walls of the bar in Neukölln,...

by Justin E. H. Smith I am in Iceland for the first time in many years, for no better reason than that Icelandair offers extended stopovers on transatlantic flights at no additional cost. I cross the Atlantic as casually as one might take the subway from borough to borough,...

Franzen has described his relationship with Wallace as one of “compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete.” It began when Wallace wrote Franzen a fan letter in the summer of 1988, after reading his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City.

Toni Morrison From New York Magazine: Toni Morrison never liked that old seventies slogan “Black is beautiful.” It was superficial, simplistic, palliative—everything her blinkered detractors called Morrison’s complex novels when the 1993 Nobel Prize transformed her into a spokeswoman and a target. No better were those blinkered admirers who...

It's cold and wet – the worst kind of early winter morning. I'm traversing a landscape under endless gray cloud cover, the ground softened to the consistency of flesh by a long night of rain. I pass through areas that look like small cities, sprawls of gray buildings groped...