November 2010
‘When Maoists put a grass mohican on the Churchill statue, British conservatism seemed to go mad for a few days’
From 3am Magazine: Police are the historic enemy of the protestor and Bloom reminds us that at the Met’s formation most people were anti-cop. The idea of putting random civilians in uniform and giving them power over the rest seemed insane, a recipe for mayhem. Critics had a point....
Read MoreHow can it be that a tree blooms in winter?
Strip Show: In defense of bare trees | by Miriam N. Kotzin
The Smart Set
Driving alone on a highway through the desert of the Southwest, I passed a sign announcing the “Last Services for 100 Miles.” I asked myself, “How...
Read More‘Obama knew little economics, however, and he took the word of the orthodox…’
From London Review of Books: Of all Obama’s appointments, the most damaging to his credibility with liberal supporters were Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, the chief economic adviser and the secretary of the treasury. Geithner has the air of a perpetual young man looking out for the interests of...
Read MorePlaying the News: Berfrois Interviews Simon Ferrari
by Russell Bennetts Simon Ferrari is a doctoral student in digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He recently co-authored Newsgames: Journalism at Play with Ian Bogost and Bobby Schweizer. Simon blogs about gaming at Chungking Expresso. Berfrois What are Newsgames? Are they closer in nature to...
Read MoreBallet Lives!
Is Ballet Really Dying? | by Claudia La Rocco
Slate
Ballet is dying. Maybe already dead. Impossible, you say, I've got tickets to a show!
Read MoreDiscount him 30% for embroidery
From Barnes and Noble Review: Autobiography of Mark Twain, reviewed by Ward Sutton, Barnes and Noble Review
Read MoreGyan Prakash: Myths of the Island City
Photo by Stephane Le Gal by Gyan Prakash Mumbai Fables, the latest book from historian Gyan Prakash, has been praised by Salman Rushdie as “a fascinating exploration of my favourite city, full of insider knowledge and sharp insights.” Here Prakash explains the genesis of the book and the upcoming film...
Read MoreHow could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so wrong about the environment?
Kenneth Brower has a number of theories: 1. Contrariness 2. He doesn’t really mean it 3. Educated fool 4. Old age 5. Collision of faiths From The Atlantic: In August 2009, Dyson appeared on the Charlie Rose show. His inimitable voice—somehow both diffident and firm, its original British...
Read MoreWalden’s Finest
From The New York Review of Books: There have been other comic strips that dealt with politics, but they did so sporadically, and as one-trick diversions—Al Capp satirizing the welfare state with his schmoos, Walt Kelly turning Senator Joseph McCarthy into Simple J. Malarkey—but Trudeau has reflected on politics...
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Like many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
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A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
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As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
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Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
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What, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
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Poet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
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In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
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Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
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To 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...
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Now 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...
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A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
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The 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....
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As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
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The memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
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If duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
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Burton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
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I’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
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The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
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