What Are Popular Economies?

All writing is personal. How could it be otherwise? People spend what is most precious—their lives—doing it.

A baby named Stephen Foster was born, who though white, would grow up harboring the ambition to become the “best Ethiopian songwriter”...

A prevailing notion of the lives of artists holds that hedonism is a meaningful part of production. The slide projector on the subject has no shortage of famous faces: There’s boozy Faulkner, banging out novels and screenplays while pickled...

A rentier economy (Christophers uses the term unapologetically) is driven by profits, which have increased in real terms as the poor have been denied social housing...

Despite being a casual fan of EDM, I can't tell you literally what Steve Angello was doing on stage. Perhaps he was mixing tracks in the traditional sense, one after another...

At one point, Flights’ narrator finds herself gazing at a sarira, a fleck-like relic that sometimes remains after the cremation of the corpse of a Buddhist spiritual master, and wonders...

Back in 1997, when liberal capitalism bestrode the Atlantic and history had been abolished, morning came with a newspaper. The paper you got depended not just on your taste, but on where you lived...

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart...

Sandberg had covered for the firm as it, among other ethical offenses, employed a Republican opposition-research that used the time-honored anti-Semitic dog whistle...

I was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1949, so I grew up playing cowboys and Indians with my cousins in the rubble fields of my native city.

For the past decade, A.S. Hamrah has been the sharp-tongued, rain-lashed drifter of American movie criticism.

The dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...

In 1974, with classics like Nashville and Network still forthcoming, Kael wrote that though American movies were “probably the best in the world"...

Constantine P. Cavafy’s sexuality (1863-1933) was a paradox. While he composed daring homoerotic verse, he wrote very little about his own erotic life.

When I was about ten or eleven years old, it was common at my boys’ school to make a loose fist, insert one’s nose...