Theme: America
-
The formula of the "99 percent" seems at once incredibly rhetorical and real. We are used to hyperbole; we are less used to an absurdly lopsided figure that is actually matched by a reality. Poetic figuration meets statistical validity.Read more
-
The scene is a mysterious one, beguiling, thrilling, and, if you didn’t know better, perhaps even a bit menacing. According to the time-enhanced version of the story, it opens on an afternoon in the late fall of 1965, when without warning, a number of identical dark-green vans suddenly appear and sweep out from a parking lot in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.Read more
-
Krys Lee reads a passage from her new novel, Drifting House, about a South Korean woman who travels to America to search for her daughter whom she believes has been kidnapped.Read more
-
Ryan Boudinot reads a passage from his new novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife, set in a a post-apocalyptic America.Read more
-
The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. Read more
-
In a recent NPR piece TV critic Eric Deggans cites shows like "Hell on Wheels," Sons of Anarchy," "Dexter," and "Breaking Bad" as evidence of a proliferations of television programs featuring "characters the audience likes and wants to see succeed, even though they act an awful lot like villains."Read more
-
If we are to believe the Beethoven mythology, which is based mostly on his letters and reports from his inner circle, Beethoven had an unshakeable sense of his own importance.Read more
-
With every year, the US naval base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay becomes less of a place and more of a concept, one that seems to have sprung from a vacuum on January 11, 2002, when twenty of the earliest detainees in the “war on terror” arrived there in orange jumpsuits, blackened goggles, shackles and earmuffs.Read more
-
Fair season and we’re tent pitching on holy grounds in central Illinois, busting through pavement with jack hammers, driving home a stake that will be pulled two months from now. Read more
-
Governors curtail workers’ rights. President Obama’s second term is in question. The divide between the nation’s top 1% and the rest threatens to swallow us all. It’s not easy being on the Left today. Read more
-
Why, I asked, had collective violence more or less disappeared from the streets of American cities? Alienation, marginalization, youth unemployment and distrust of the police – these, surely, were as prevalent in American cities as in urban France. Read more
-
A few miles from my house lies a block of abandoned row homes, fronts tightly sealed against vandals, which appear to be inhabited only by pigeons and the occasional rodent.Read more
-
Under the communist regime of Czechoslovakia, Havel staged plays such as the banned The Garden Party. In the play, a man adapts so well to the absurdity of the communist system in order to get placed into a good job that his family no longer recognizes him.Read more
-
In the spring of 1990 I packed up as much of my life in London as would fit into a suitcase and four large plywood boxes and flew to Seattle to set up house. It was a selfish and irregular move. Read more
-
As Teresa Goddu argues, the ‘American’ gothic is usually a ‘regional term,’ referring quite specifically to the South. In the 19th Century, the region functions as a ‘repository’ for a variety of cultural anxieties having mostly to do with the moral degeneration of the nation. Read more
-
The only way to start this story is by opening a door – the door leading into the Loony Gas building. The workers at the Standard Oil Refinery in New Jersey, gave the building that name, waving goodbye to their colleagues when they entered the shadowed openingRead more
-
When I leave the pavement and hit the hard white of the Bonneville Salt Flats, I press the pedal to the metal on The Hummer. The speedometer hits 94, but that’s nothing to brag about at my destinationRead more
