April 2015

Kim Jong-un, Vasily Galaktionov, 2013 by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman The changing dictatorships Dictatorships are not what they used to be. The totalitarian tyrants of the past – such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot – employed terror, indoctrination, and isolation to monopolise power. Although less ideological, many 20th-century...

The history of philosophy looks a bit like a sine wave (or a roller coaster, if you prefer). It goes up and then down, up again, and then down.

Let’s call this phase after postmodernism post-postmodernism – “popomo” for short.

by Elias Tezapsidis The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History, by Robin Givhan, Flatiron Books, 320 pp. Fashion critic Robin Givhan’s new book (out this week from Flatiron Books) takes us to The Battle of Versailles Fashion Show, a fundraising event...

Some minutes into the UK premiere of Wim Wenders and Juliano Riberdo Salgado's The Salt of the Earth at the benefit opening of the 2015 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, someone whispers in my ear: “So what does this have to do with human rights?”

Not everything Gertrude Stein wrote is worth calling poetry. Stein says so herself in “Poetry and Grammar,” because “for me the problem of poetry was and it began with Tender Buttons to constantly realize the thing anything so that I could recreate that thing.”

We recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world.

You still. Have time. Things can happen in one day.

I was born in 1989 at the end of hip-hop’s infancy. By the time I dropped into being, hip-hop had a Grammy and platinum records.

In postmodernity, localities, cities, nations, and all types of spaces and communities began to develop distinctive qualities to attract the flows of global capital. Postmodern culture was thus fully subsumed in the production and marketing of difference.

Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism restages and reactivates Fredric Jameson’s call, over twenty years prior, for a new situation and new mode of criticism adequate to late capitalism.

One of the compensations of being an insomniac in a snowbound house full of books is that I can always find something to read and distract myself from whatever mood I’m in.

While Sarah Silverman jokingly tells us that her Jewish identity has more to do with her body than with the “responsibilities and limitations” that come with “accepting being identified with being Jewish.”

An offering that might well remain in its being offered.

D’Venue: Dulono’s Pizza in Minneapolis

I get the impulse to look to the canon, but I think we should try and challenge and squash the canon, too.