November 2018
Welcome to Earths

For the past decade, A.S. Hamrah has been the sharp-tongued, rain-lashed drifter of American movie criticism.
Read MoreNatalie Lawrence: Global Greed and the Gluttonous Dodo

The 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 MoreBiography as Novel: A Look at Cavafy in Love

Constantine P. Cavafy’s sexuality (1863-1933) was a paradox. While he composed daring homoerotic verse, he wrote very little about his own erotic life.
Read MoreJewishnessness

When I was about ten or eleven years old, it was common at my boys’ school to make a loose fist, insert one’s nose...
Read MoreCandy Intake

When I was an undergraduate way back in the ’80s, colleges and universities tended to treat creative writing classes like candy; too many would make you sick and weak.
Read MoreBlack–Scholes Misfires

‘Performativity’ has, for example, been employed by the French economic sociologist Michel Callon as a way of denoting the capacity of a mathematical model or other aspect of ‘economics’ to be more than a representation of some external reality.
Read MoreChris Moffat on Naeem Mohaiemen

What does an anti-colonial building look like? In Naeem Mohaiemen’s 2017 film Two Meetings and a Funeral, Vijay Prashad stands in the centre of La Coupole d’Alger in the suburbs of Algiers...
Read MoreFrom 9 to 5 to 4.91 to 4.79

In May 2016, after months of failing to find a traditional job, I began driving for the ride-hailing company Lyft. I was enticed by an online advertisement that promised new drivers in the Los Angeles area a $500 “sign-up bonus” after completing their first 75 rides.
Read MoreEven music and drama classes neglected to reference queer culture…

It was during the hangover years of Section 28 that I attended a comprehensive school in Derby...
Read More‘Cultural Marxism’ is for the New Right both a symbol of the enemy and an example of successful politics…

Among historians, 1968 is increasingly viewed as a publishing phenomenon – some have even talked about a ‘paperback revolution’...
Read MoreBolsonaro and Amazonian Deforestation

With Bolsonaro’s ascension, Brazil — home to the largest rainforest in the world — is facing an “Apocalypse Now” moment for the Amazon. When he takes office...
Read MoreThe Fall is into Technology

When I think of technology, of thinking about technology, I recall Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan and John Cage. Jessica mentions none of them...
Read MoreControlled Experience: Berfrois Interviews Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos is the author of the Poena Damni trilogy, which has developed as a work in progress over the course of thirty years...
Read MoreThe Philosopher of Perhaps. Or?—

All his life, Friedrich Nietzsche hated being photographed. Execution “by the one-eyed Cyclops,” he called it.
Read MoreHow much différance does it make?

In the five years since I moved to Paris as an American philosopher, my disdain for what Americans know as ‘French theory’ has only deepened...
Read MoreEd Simon: A Gospel for the Left

Pause and reflect on the implications of a white Protestant in the Jim Crow South applying America’s ugliest word to Christ...
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...
Read More