February 2011
Sex Please, We’re Russian

Final of Miss Russia 2010. In Soviet times, beauty contests were unknown. Ideologists considered such public displays of the female body as decadent bourgeois behavior. by Elena Fanailova A couple of years ago I was part of a group of young female writers on an Oxford University course called...
Read MoreNo Archaic/Modern Divide; or, Behavioural Variability in Premodern Humans

Refuting a Myth About Human Origins | by John J. Shea
American Scientist
For decades, archeologists have believed that modern behaviors emerged among Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years after our species first evolved. Archaeologists disagreed over whether this process was...
Read MoreMario Carpo: Post-Authorial Creation

A Cobbler’s Workshop (Schusterwerkstatt), Max Liebermann, 1881-82 by Mario Carpo The main thesis of The Alphabet and the Algorithm is simple–symmetrical, almost. In the beginning it was hand-making. Most handmade things, even when made sequentially, are different from one another, because that’s the way human hands function. Think of a signature: most...
Read More‘You can French kiss yourself’

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), United Artists, 1972 From Guernica: The first time I successfully masturbated I was eleven and my older brother and his girlfriend were watching Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to...
Read MoreDeep Cleaning and Other Cosmic Issues

by Claire B. Potter Clutter Busting: Letting Go of What’s Holding You Back, by Brooks Palmer, California: New World Library, 232 pp. One of the reasons that self-help books are so successful is that they introduce complex thinking to people who aren’t normally exposed to it, or who are...
Read MoreInformation Flood

Moore’s Law original graph From The New York Review of Books: According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first...
Read MoreGood-bye to the straw feminist

Eflon by Cordelia Fine “This was not a permissible hypothesis”. That was social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent explanation of the outrage that followed Lawrence Summers’ speech at a conference on the under-representation of women in science and engineering, in which he suggested that women are on average intrinsically less...
Read More‘Captain America carries, after all, not a sword but a shield’

America’s heroes | by Nick Harkaway
Prospect
We don’t have superheroes in Britain the way they do in the US. John Constantine, the brutal magus anti-hero of DC Comics’ Hellblazer, once observed that Britain is a country where no one would have...
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 MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’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.
Read MoreThe 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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