October 2010
Berfrois Interviews Gabriel Josipovici

The first thing to be said is that to define Modernism in any way at all is to take a stand. In that it is like Romanticism. You cannot write a 'history of Romanticism' or of Modernism, because you cannot stand above it on some neutral vantage-point.
Read MoreWelcome to the Mug Shot

Bill Bailey Comes Home | by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Paris Review Blog
I followed the band around Europe for a while, feeding cigarettes to the band members’ model girlfriends and failing to secure face time with “Ax”...
Read MoreAn Empire Lacking Food

From American Scientist: Let me reintroduce you to planet Earth. Nearly 64 percent of its surface, close to 208,640,000 square kilometers, sits below 200 meters of water. The lack of light at those depths prohibits photosynthesis, the biological energy conversion system that is the foundation of most food...
Read MoreA New Stimulation

From The Millions: I’ve been on the Internet since I was fourteen years old. I’ve always loved it here. But a few months back, I found myself a bit troubled by what I perceived to be a difference in the way my mind was working. I would be at...
Read MoreCan a big voice be too much of a good thing?

Noises On | by Patrick Dillon
OperaNews
"Am I too loud?" Gerald Moore famously queried in the title of his "musical autobiography" of 1962...
Read MoreKidnapped!

by A. Roger Ekirch From Common-Place: In London on St. Valentine’s Day in 1945, the aspiring young novelist Patrick O’Brian, today regarded as one of the great twentieth-century writers of historical fiction, received as a gift an early volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Published in 1744, it briefly recounted...
Read MoreZombie Economic Ideas That Refuse to Die

From Foreign Policy: Theories, factual claims, and policy proposals that seemed dead and buried in the wake of the financial crisis are now clawing their way through the soft earth, ready to wreak havoc once again. Five of these zombie ideas seem worthy of particular attention and, if possible,...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
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