The Grand Danger!

The YA serial came into its own in the 1980s…

If Christopher Pike’s YA novels were sold out at my local Crown Books, I was faced with the choice of either Sweet Valley High or The Baby-Sitters Club...

For a guy who was supposed to be a kind of burly farm animal as an athlete, there was a lot of mental derring-do in Ruth’s game...

Moral superiority and cancel culture only further alienate the people already excluded from meritocracy and elite cultural capital...

On any given day, walking around the yard, one was almost certain to hear one prisoner ask another, “Hey, man, got any gurps?” I knew it had something to do with drugs...

At first, users paid real money for the upkeep of virtual chickens, sheep, bees, and cattle, earning cash back in the game by keeping the animals alive. Riding high on the good publicity, Farm Bank soon went one step further, launching real-life farms...

If there is ever to be a next generation, we need one another, flawed as we are...

These books destined me to an unbalanced life, like a poorly packed U-Haul that leans too far to one side...

Lamenting the Obsolescence of the DVD and Its Distinctive Viewing Practices

After the local video-game arcade and the local comic-book store, the finest establishment on earth was the local video-rental outlet, a paradise of garish rectangular boxes leaning precariously on wooden shelves divided roughly by genre...

It’s argued that you feel all those things at other moments in the month but take note of the full moon because full moons are memorable, and then make a mistaken connection...

Have they clocked our nocturnal ways that bite at kleptomaniac clockhands in our capitals?

‘Another time, they talked about mermaids’

It is hard to distinguish what Chinese gamers truly want, and what the industry, or the Chinese Communist party, has decided for them...

Supply-Side Innovations and the Opioid Cycle

There are two competing perspectives about the cause of the opioid explosion, and they lead to different policy prescriptions...

For Van Gogh, the Camargue huts were active…

Humble dwellings like the Camargue huts invite us to tell a different kind of story about human-environment relationships, one less focused on human beings’ mastery of nature...

Who or what is Peter Pan? Peter stands for a deep psychological desire in all of us to return to childhood and escape into an earlier, freer state of being...

The Doom of the Great City imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later...

Liberia, Mexico and Racial Republicanism

Colonizationism was not merely a part of the debate over wartime emancipation but rather reflected the United States’ race-based imperial ambitions...

Douglas Penick: House of Spiritual Retreat

You cannot understand this building’s purpose, but you know that you have just encountered a poetic even mythic work of architecture...

Don’t we go to literature to find the logic that might displace the absurdity of our lives?

The Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary...

Both Derrida and Ronell suggest that saying yes is “telephonic,” both in the sense that it resounds over a distance and therefore always is affected by distortion and delay, and that the telephone as technological apparatus not so much adds to these inherent obstructions as it stands model for them.

I don’t even care about secrecy, usually, because the scenario of exposing what’s unjustly censored has always seemed overdramatic to me, a distraction: all communication amounts to a defense.

Today I ran without music. When I run this way my head boils out, matter shooting everywhere like water on hot oil. Phrases reach me and mostly move away before I can trap and extend them into actual thoughts.

Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy.

Lauren Berlant flies

Lauren Berlant

Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed.

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