January 2017
Only Somewhat

Over the course of 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change.
Read MoreFour Hits From Døves Tidsskrift

I was in my early twenties when my aunt handed me a VHS cassette with my mother’s name written on the label. My aunt and mom worked at a school for hearing-impaired children in Oslo, Norway, and at some point in the 1980s the school introduced video technology
Read MoreAngry Young Socialist

Though no one would mistake Hare for a populist—his dozens of plays, adaptations, TV and movie scripts, several books, and countless newspaper columns are too cerebral for that—he has struck an antiestablishment stance since his early career.
Read MoreAnti-Archive

Page has been making annual trips to the Texas-Mexico borderlands since 2007, and one of her projects is walking along the river in search of objects people leave behind when they’re crossing.
Read More‘Which side are you on?’

The woman with sandy brown hair was nodding and smiling and crying as she sat behind the wheel of her stationary car on the Southeast Freeway in Washington DC. We made our black-clad way through the rows of quiet vehicles while chanting and clapping and smiling at those we...
Read MoreEd Simon: Darkness Made Visible

A few months after the end of the United States’ bicentennial year, and an unassuming, unpublished junior professor from Wordsworth and Southey College in bucolic Susquehanna, Pennsylvania found himself at the center of a media firestorm that was jocularly called “Miltongate.”
Read More“Editorial policy is defined at the top of the BBC”

In the interwar period, the system of broadcasting pioneered by the BBC was referred to as ‘remote state control’. It emerged from a situation where politicians did not want a chaotic system of broadcasting to develop, especially given the presumed political power of the new medium.
Read MoreInformal actors came to the Kremlin’s aid…

"Kompromat", meaning compromising materials, as a tactic to smear one's opponents, came into use in Russia in the late 1990s, and back then it was a mix of intercepted phone calls and analytical profiles prepared by the oligarchs' shadowy security details or the government security services.
Read MoreMarsha Pomerantz: Left/Right

Mothers don’t eat. It had come to my attention that mothers were fueled by something other than food: possibly telephone talk and worry. I wondered how old you had to be to turn into a mother and not have to eat anymore.
Read MoreAnthony Ausiello on Magical Realism

Reading Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men made me realize magical realism could play a complex role in fiction, that it could be utilized as another literary tool in an author’s craft.
Read MoreThe erasure of Islam from Rumi’s poetry started long ago…

Rumi was born in the early thirteenth century, in what is now Afghanistan. He later settled in Konya, in present-day Turkey, with his family. His father was a preacher and religious scholar, and he introduced Rumi to Sufism.
Read MoreX: A Machine to End All Machines

Can you feel it coming? The machine? Can you feel it, can you see it from your high window, beneath the yellow sun, in the distance, furrowing beneath that black soil as it makes its way toward you?
Read MoreDavos is particularly fond of borrowing authoritarian capitalist ideas…

While it’s easy to see how this establishment structure could provoke an uprising, two developments over the last decade have made it especially susceptible.
Read More‘At the heart of this game of betrayal is trust’

A former MI6 agent is commissioned, by the opposition, to investigate an American presidential campaign that most people regard as a joke. He uncovers an international conspiracy led by the Russian secret services to put their man in the White House.
Read MoreMaybe these pills can do the trick?

by Steve Mentz Motion disorients bodies. When they are moved, bodies seek stable refuge—whether the bodies in question comprise shipwrecked sailors, strife-torn nations, dislocated asylum-seekers, or even confused students. Poetry offers a partial, not always effective, response to motion sickness. In disorienting times and places, we imagine refuge—while not averting...
Read MoreMenachem Feuer: Pynchon and the Schlemiel

What many literary critics overlook, however, is the fact that the schlemiel has also found its way into the pages of great Anglo-American writers like John Updike (see his “Beck” series) and Thomas Pynchon.
Read MoreJohn Canaday: Unriddling

Jeredith Merrin’s Owling, winner of the 2016 Grayson Chapbook contest, consists of 19 poems, each named after one of 18 species of owls from around the world.
Read MoreVarious Costumed Dramas

“I can’t just sit here and watch Netflix for the next four years and disappear into various costumed dramas,” said Belieu, the “Writers Resist” organizer. “I’m not going to live in fear. And I’m not going to keep my mouth shut.”
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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