C Wright Mills commuting to Columbia College, Yaroslava Mills by Dan Hind The inexhaustible novelty of how we feel serves to protect the old order from what we think. C. Wright Mills begins his essay The Sociological Imagination by drawing a contrast between the ‘everyday worlds’ that ordinary people are aware of, where ‘their visions…
Read MoreThe library, Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House From The Paris Review: When the 104-year-old copper heiress Huguette Clark died earlier this week, obituaries invariably included the word eccentric. This was surely due at least somewhat to her apparent preference for making her home in hospitals. But part of it—the bigger part, I’m guessing—was her passion for…
Read MoreThe whale painter at work. I am about to start painting in the teeth. The Adventures of a Whale Painter During a vacation in the Virgin Islands, I became intrigued with an old queen conch shell that I found on the beach. It was encrusted with coral growths and grit, but I decided to clean…
Read MoreWe dreamed of glowing children,
their throats alive and cancerous,
their eyes like lightning in the dark.
by Christopher Todd Matthews One hand slops suds on, one hustles them down like a blind. Brusque noon glare, filtered thus, loosens and glows. For five or six minutes he owns the place, dismal coffee bar, and us, its huddled underemployed. A blade, black line against the topmost glass, begins, slices off the outer lather,…
Read MoreDetail of Breakfast with Glass of Champagne and Pipe, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, 1642 From The Paris Review: The story repeated most often in the gastronomical canon is Plutarch’s anecdote about the Roman patrician Lucullus. Asked if he might want a simple dinner on a night with no guests, the great gastronome orders up a…
Read MoreDon Quixote in a Printing House in Barcelona, William T. Wiley From The Paris Review: What does it mean to be “quixotic” today? Are street-corner preachers quixotic? Is Bono? What about film directors who dementedly pursue the unlikely grail of adapting a difficult book for the screen? The word endures because its source endures. Don…
Read MoreThe Palestra, University of Pennsylvania’s arena in Philadelphia From Projo: For my pilgrimage to West Philly, I needed a spiritual guide, so I turned to John Edgar Wideman, the distinguished novelist and Brown University professor who played brilliant basketball for Penn from 1959 to 1963. But Wideman’s recollections proved so interesting that I wound up…
Read MoreSinai Field Mission, Zipporah Films, 1976 From The Paris Review: One thing surprised me in 1978. Fred had little interest in watching other movies at the festival. He was interested in London theater and excited about the prospect of going to a play. I still believe, over thirty years later, that his movies come from…
Read MoreAlien, 20th Century Fox, 1979 by Norah Campbell and Mike Saren Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue…
Read MoreEflon by Cordelia Fine “This was not a permissible hypothesis”. That was social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent explanation of the outrage that followed Lawrence Summers’ speech at a conference on the under-representation of women in science and engineering, in which he suggested that women are on average intrinsically less capable of high-level mathematical and scientific…
Read MoreFrom The Chronicle of Higher Education: When at age 4 my daughter Anna became increasingly anxious at bedtime, I tried coaxing her to sleep with the most melodious poems I knew. “Come live with me and be my love,” I began as I sat on her bed in a triangle of hallway light, rubbing her…
Read MoreFerris Bueller’s Day Off, Paramount Pictures, 1986 From The Paris Review: My husband and I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) the other night. He’d never seen it before, to the consternation of his Facebook friends, and I last saw it a decade ago, when I remember having been vaguely entertained. Not this time, though.…
Read Moreby Grace Cavalieri Tomato pies are what we called them, those days, before Pizza came in, at my Grandmother’s restaurant, in Trenton New Jersey. My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy by coming to America. Uncle…
Read Moreby Molly Fisk Early December, dusk, and the sky slips down the rungs of its blue ladder into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs in the air above the ridge like a broken plate and shines on us all, on the new deputy almost asleep in his four-by-four, lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher,…
Read MoreFrom The Paris Review: Mario Vargas Llosa enters his hotel after receiving the Nobel Prize. He’s left behind the post-prize official banquet, the pomp and ceremony of a dinner with the Swedish royal family and their 1,300 guests from all over the world. He’s tired but has the glow of an epic hero surveying his…
Read MoreField Guides, Fred Tomaselli, 2003 From The Paris Review: A fledgling installation artist in California, Tomaselli schooled himself in late twentieth-century America’s far-out utopian and dystopian fireworks, ingesting influences from surfboard and car culture, finish-fetish art, Chris Burden and his conceptual noodlings, the light and space trickery of Robert Irwin and James Turrell, the California…
Read Moreby Bruce High Quality Foundation Via The Paris Review Daily
Read MoreFrom The Point Magazine: The voice couldn’t have come from anyone older than twelve. There was no rasp, no pubescent pitchiness. “I’m gonna rape again!” It took me a moment to connect the meaning of the words to the sound of the voice. And I couldn’t tell whose voice it was. Maybe Deadlylilbro22. Or ChronicJman03.…
Read Moreby Daniel Metcalfe Daniel Metcalfe’s book ‘Out of Steppe’ describes his journey through Central Asia. In this excerpt he describes the Karakalpak landscape around the Aral Sea. The Soviet tourist destination, previously the centre of a successful fishing industry, is now depopulated, polluted by the chemicals used to prop up the failing cotton industry and…
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