Theme: Interview
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Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is certainly no stranger to controversy. His radical reconceptualization of the term “Holocaust” — in whose “unscrupulous employment” he locates “a cowardly and unimaginative glibness” — to extend beyond the scope of the concentration camps and those who perished therein, rhetorically privileges the survivors over the dead: “the word [Holocaust] actually only relates to those who were incarcerated: the dead, but not the survivors... The survivor is an exception.”Read more
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Any identity, even a Latina identity, can be very limiting. When I speak on panels with other women, you wouldn’t believe how much slut-shaming there is, which is why this work is so important to me. I think it’s ignorance and a lack of understanding. Read more
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Ice-T and Coco in Richard Belzer's Conversation.Read more
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Happiness is something that Ruskin talks about a lot in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and in various essays on architecture. He talks about one of the goals of architecture as being happiness. I think this probably comes from his readings of Vitruvius.Read more
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I don’t know about the time of Marx’s original publications, but I’d like to believe that in the 1890s perhaps, 1920s, when there was a strong labor movement going on in the country, a lot of civil unrest, my sense of things is that it was possible to describe oneself as a Marxist, to use Marxist ideas, to appropriate Marxist categories and language, to use the ideas of socialism in a fairly overt and mainstream way for the purpose of social organization.Read more
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Well, one important thing to keep in mind is that in the 65 events that I did, at each stop I would tell them that we must bring Reaganism to a close – McCain and Palin were the last moments of Reaganite policy (unregulated markets, indifference towards the poor, stagnating wages) – and that if Obama won, I would break dance in the afternoon and be his major critic the next morning. That’s how I ended every speechRead more
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In a clip from a 1974 Michael Parkinson interview, Orson Welles speaks about his relationship with Ernest Hemingway.Read more
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It was because my parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I actually did take a Constitutional Law course in order to please them; but when I’d read some judicial decisions, it seemed to me I could make equally bad arguments without bothering to get a law degree. Hence philosophy since, being very young, I thought of philosophers as particularly rational sorts of people; a view of which faculty meetings soon disabused me.Read more
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Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer describes her escape from the racist ideology she grew up with in South Africa.Read more
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We don’t choose our interview subjects because we think they have something special to say to American writers, though I guess that’s always true. They’re people who really fascinate us. Sometimes a favorite writer will suggest someone whose work I and the other editors don’t know. Then we’ll hunt down some books and take a look.Read more
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Darwin chose agnostic for tactical reasons. He said the common man was not ready for atheism. There’s a lovely story the comedian Julia Sweeney tells about her own journey from devout Catholicism to atheism. After she’d finally decided she was an atheist, something appeared about it in the newspaper. Her mother phoned her in hysterics and said something like “I don’t mind you not believing in God, but an atheist?” Read more
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Ing Phouséra, or Séra, as he is known in artistic circles, is a French-Cambodian comics artist who evacuated Phnom Penh with his French mother in 1975. While the subject of his works range far and into other media, he came to my attention for his graphic novels about the Khmer Rouge period and its aftermath in Cambodia: Impasse et Rouge, L'Eau et la Terre and Lendemains de cendres. Read more
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I attended a troubled, inner-city high school in Minneapolis, became disenchanted with formal education, and went to college more or less by accident—a long story involving my then-girlfriend’s dental work. I registered for classes at the University of Minnesota at the last minute (as one could in those days), stumbled almost by accident into a Greek History course, and was immediately taken by the subject matter and the austere manner in which it was presented.Read more
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Plant ethics shares with veganism a strong commitment to justice, which is to say, to the reduction of violence humans perpetrate against other living beings. It is by no means a threat to or an invalidation of veganism. Rather, plant ethics is an open invitation to fine-tune our dietary practices in keeping with the philosophical and botanical considerations of what plants are, what they are capable of, and what our relation to them should be.Read more
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