by Lisa Klarr As Teresa Goddu argues, the ‘American’ gothic is usually a ‘regional term,’ referring quite specifically to the South. In the 19th Century, the region functions as a ‘repository’ for a variety of cultural anxieties having mostly to do with the moral degeneration of the nation. But amidst the industrialist fervor of the…
Read Moreby Richard M. Cook I discovered Alfred Kazin’s journals in the summer of 1984. I was researching a book on American public criticism, criticism written for the reading public, or what Virginia Woolf called the “common reader,” rather than for academics. Kazin was one of the critics I wanted to include along with Lionel Trilling,…
Read MoreChristopher Zurbuchen by E. M. Forster I. THE AIR-SHIP Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are…
Read MoreA GEO Group prison by Loïc Wacquant The increasing penalization of poverty is a response to social insecurity; a result of public policy that weds the “invisible hand” of the market to the “iron fist” of the penal state. How and why has the prison returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when…
Read MoreZoe Saldana during the making of Avatar, 20th Century Fox, 2009 From Eurozine: As Giorgio Agamben has argued, cinema is an art of the gesture, since it is an important part of an age of modernity where gestures are transformed by industrial machines. Nervous illnesses and gestural hiccups abound in early cinema – the emblematic…
Read MoreOne of Japan’s blueprints for a regional telecommunications network by Daqing Yang Shortly after 12:00 o’clock Tokyo Time on August 15, 1945, the prerecorded voice of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito was broadcast from a studio in downtown Tokyo. “After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today,”…
Read Moreby Ed Yong Erez Lieberman Aiden is a talkative witty fellow, who will bend your ear on any number of intellectual topics. Just don’t ask him what he does. “This is actually the most difficult question that I run into on a regular basis,” he says. “I really don’t have anything for that.” It is…
Read MoreChris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman as Thor and Jane Foster, Thor, Paramount Pictures, 2011 by David A. Kirby For most people, the start of the summer blockbuster season would not be an ideal time to be examining movies for their scientific verisimilitude. Big, silly popcorn flicks are about explosions, muscled men in tights fighting CGI creatures,…
Read MoreFrom Monthly Review: The main consequences of the internationalization of monopoly capital for accumulation are the intensification of world exploitation and a deepening tendency to stagnation. Since the 1970s, there has been a worsening slowdown in the rate of growth of the world economy centered in the advanced capitalist economies—while many of the most dire…
Read MoreMichael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, and is one of the most influential political theorists of our time. Jonathan Bruno and Jason Swadley sat down with him recently in Cambridge with 12 questions on the craft of political philosophy. Art of Theory…
Read Moreby Herman Melville I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists…
Read MoreAfghan Mujahideen with surface to air stinger missile, near Jalalabad, 1989, Steve McCurry by Dan Caldwell The development and advancement of technology has influenced reform and revolution throughout history, but arguably never more so than during the last three decades in the Middle East. The recent “Facebook revolutions” are the current manifestations of this trend.…
Read MoreAtchafalaya Basin, Louisiana From The New Yorker: The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present…
Read MoreRound structures, Site PVN306, Naco Valley by Edward M. Schortman and Patricia A. Urban A debate that has long fascinated us concerns the ways in which political relations emerge from, and are sustained by, daily interactions among individuals of all ranks. The traditional approach in our discipline, archaeology, has tended to stress the out-sized roles of elites…
Read MoreThe Battle of Algiers, Rizzoli, 1966 From Domus: If the line between the East and the West and North and South is one of those geopolitical hot zones in which war and revolution have been ever-present, commentators have nevertheless chosen the crises of the 1950s as the reference point for the current chain of events.…
Read MoreCoca Plantation, Madre de Dios, Peru, Benedicte Desrus by Elaine Carey Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, by Paul Gootenberg, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 442 pp. As someone who also has become interested in the scholarly analysis of the commodity flows of miracle powders, tinctures, and plants, I would rank Paul Gootenberg’s…
Read MoreSmoking street pipe on Wall Street, 2010, Guillaume Gaudet by Jean-Louis Arcand, Enrico Berkes and Ugo Panizza Over the last three decades the US financial sector has grown six times faster than nominal GDP. This column argues that there comes a point when the financial sector has a negative effect on growth – that is, when credit…
Read MoreFrom The Chronicle Review: Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx’s ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian…
Read MoreFrom Boston Review: Ships as far as the eye can see. The rising sun glittering on the Aegean. Wind rippling the sails, water lapping the bows, fear, excitement, vengeance, glory, the favor of the gods, the order contemplated, the order given. Or, expressed differently: Since obviously under any analysis I have to do either O…
Read MoreFrom The Chronicle Review: In the most acclaimed of the operas and so-called music dramas of Richard Wagner, hefty figures from Germanic legend and myth grapple in torrid romances of mythic proportions. Bosoms heave, all over the place—no audience member, and no Wagner critic, has ever been in doubt about that. But Laurence Dreyfus says something…
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