November 2016

With so little to guide predictions, the reality of a Trump presidency has become a national Rorschach test. Conservatives and the anti-establishment imagine an ascendant Trump will set a path for a more competitive national economy, smaller government, and a stronger defense.

You don’t get to choose when it’s over but, do you get a chance to recognize that it is? Americans have elected an accused child rapist. An accused rapist who is also accused of sexual assault he condones. And that’s just part of it as you know. Trump may...

Main Scene from the Ballet “The False Oath”, Paul Klee, 1922 by David Beer The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness, by Walter Benjamin. Translated and introduced by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski. Illustrated by Paul Klee. London: Verso Books, 240 pp. Walter Benjamin is full of surprises. This...

When medievalists Eileen Joy and Nicola Masciandaro grew exasperated with the academic publishing industry, they started their own alternative, punctum books.

The Thirteenth Floor, Columbia Pictures, 1999 From The Atlantic: Gefter: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they? Hoffman: Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me...

While Andy Warhol told us that everyone wants to becomes a star, filmmakers like Woody Allen, Judd Apatow, and Seth Rogen show us that even the smallest people – what, in Yiddish, are called schlemiels - are really “larger than life.”

There were too few butterflies in Atlanta for Vladimir Nabokov’s tastes. In a letter to his wife Vera (dated October 11, 1942), the astute lepidopterist complained that the city was too far above sea level (1,000 feet) to do much in the way of butterfly catching.

We’re co-hosting an opening night party for Colin Raff’s latest art installation. Hope to see you there!

It was one of the Franco-American scandals of the 1920s. It brought Americans on an eastward ho to undo in Paris what had been wrought in America.

Marx After Marx takes up the question of the expansion of capitalism outside of Europe, in polemical opposition to a simplified image of ‘Western Marxism’, by constructing a non-European Marxist tradition for which ‘formal subsumption’ is the key to comprehending the unevenness and necessary incompletion of capitalist development.

The Anatomy of the Bones, J. Barclay, 1829 by Scherezade Siobhan The Consequences of My Body, by Maged Zaher, Nightboat Books, 160 pp. When I begin to think of a (any) body and its liminal (autocorrect wants to reaffirm it as “luminal”) itineraries in a world that aches to slap a...