June 2017
-
June 2017 Highlights
Eric D. Lehman: Sharing Stories at Kinlochard
We took a wrong turn in Aberfoyle. Instead of heading toward Loch Katrine, the home of Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, my wife Amy and I headed along a sketchy broken road to Loch Ard.
Read More
Paul Johnathan on Édouard Louis

Eddy is a deromanticised account on all fronts. Divided into two parts and structured as a collection of vignettes, the main frame of the text is a confident reconciliation of the author with his working class background
Read MoreHannah Hughes: My Gray City

I was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,
Read MoreTranslators and Queers

It’s time for LGBTQ texts to be translated and for those translations to be analyzed, and it’s time for translators to consider what it might mean to translate LGBTQ texts and authors
Read MoreMicrodosing LSD really quieted that “Hey! You suck!” voice…

Well, I still have that voice in my head that tells me, “Hey! You suck!” But the thing about microdosing is that it really quieted that voice.
Read MoreAmerica’s id is racist…

Cuck videos frequently have racial dynamics — white men eroticize their anxiety about black-male sexuality by creating humiliation fantasies that involve sexually superior black rivals.
Read MoreSean Carroll: Is Inflationary Cosmology Science?

Inflationary cosmology is the clever idea that the early universe underwent a brief period of accelerated expansion at an enormously high energy density, before that energy converted in a flash into ordinary hot matter and radiation.
Read MoreMissing Nostalgia in Alexandria

Cavafy’s apartment, my first stop, has been converted into a museum and contains some of his furniture. His office of employment is part of the majestic Metropole Hotel on the Alexandrian waterfront, or corniche.
Read MoreThe World Cash Money Reflected

Cash Money grew slowly before it grew quickly. They became fixtures in local clubs, hole-in-the-wall spots with noirish names like Rumors and Detour and Whispers and Ghost Town.
Read MoreBe Better Buzzfeeders

Before the books arrived, Adam Gopnik, in an effort to be polite, almost contradicted the essential insight of his life.
Read MoreElizabeth Currid-Halkett: Conspicuous Consumption Is Over

In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags.
Read MoreLital Khaikin: To Justify Land

On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
Read MoreThomas Hardy was both drawn to city life and repelled by it…

Ford makes the convincing claim that London turned Hardy into ‘a modern type’ (a tag the novelist bestowed on Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native); in city life
Read MoreOK Computer was profoundly prog rock…

In April, 1971, Rolling Stone reviewed the début album by a band with a name better suited to a law firm: Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Read More‘Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter’

As recently as late April, with the Labour Party in disarray and its leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn deemed unelectable, the polls were putting the Tories twenty points ahead and telling May that her coronation was inevitable.
Read MoreJustin E. H. Smith: The Search for Intelligent Life

It is hard to read about SETI and more recent related projects looking for intelligent life in the stars without discerning in them certain silent presuppositions about what counts or should count as intelligent life on earth.
Read MoreJoseph Spece on Wonder Woman

That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.
Read MoreHenry David Thoreau: Walking

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
Read MoreClaire Provost: A ‘spiritual war’ for the ‘traditional family.’

In a darkened hall at the Budapest Congress Centre, an image of the classic American TV show, The Brady Bunch, appears illuminated on a giant screen.
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.
Read More