Owen Vince: Peaks Memes

It has become customary, at literary festivals in these troubled times to speak of translation in its myriad, metamorphic dimensions as something of a panacea for the world’s ills.

The inner motion of fear is a thick book of old tricks that brims with almost invisible, almost silent improvisations—that’s why it cannot be anticipated.

The 2009 film The Last Station, based on a fine book by Jay Parini and featuring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, made the story of Lev Tolstoy’s last days accessible to many who had not read the biographies.

At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users.

He would call me late in the night from somewhere on the road, a ghost town in Texas, a rest stop near Pittsburgh, or from Santa Fe, where he was parked in the desert, listening to the coyotes howling.

What was heartening about the general election was that it suggested a new symbolic status for policy of the sort that technocratic politics was unable to manufacture.

Paid domestic work is not recognised in my country, neither socially nor economically. This absence of recognition is experienced by thousands of women who do this type of work

Well, I still have that voice in my head that tells me, “Hey! You suck!” But the thing about microdosing is that it really quieted that voice.

Cuck videos frequently have racial dynamics — white men eroticize their anxiety about black-male sexuality by creating humiliation fantasies that involve sexually superior black rivals.

Before the books arrived, Adam Gopnik, in an effort to be polite, almost contradicted the essential insight of his life.

Comedy is hardly the first thing one associates with Sebald’s work, partly because his reputation was quickly associated with the literature of the Holocaust

The word translation itself contains the prefix trans, signifying movement rather than stability. Instead of thinking of translation as an exchange of “this” for “that” we are looking for pieces that somehow seek to retain the quality of movement and motion and change between languages and cultures.

The opening scene of Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things to Me” is, by now, a familiar one, not only because it’s repeated so often whenever Solnit is written about

There are certain things that when said are erotic no matter who says them or how they actually feel about you. Words that carry electricity, power, and charge inside of them.