The College Sweethearts, Saturday Evening Post Cover, Monte Crews by Rick Popp For nineteenth-century industrialists, college was seen as a great way to insure against a successful career in business. As ambitious young clerks learned the ins and outs of commerce, balancing accounts and scribbling correspondence, college students diddled away their time, studying dead languages…
Read Moreby Jason Dittmer The other day I was emailed by a friend: “Did you know that Gabrielle Giffords may be the Antichrist?” My eyes widened in surprise. Despite all the media attention in the wake of the Congresswoman’s January shooting, both connected to her remarkable recovery and to the subsequent debate over blood libel, targets,…
Read Moreby Heather J. Sharkey Civil wars ravaged Sudan in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Most fighting occurred between government armies and southern “rebel” forces during two stretches of conflict, often called the “first civil war”, waged between 1955 and 1971, and the “second civil war”, waged after 1983. Southern Sudanese civilians bore the brunt of…
Read MoreStephen Teso, 2010 From Design Observer: When it comes to visualizations of Ballard, his admirers and fans, as close readers of the texts, have a much better idea of what an adequately Ballardian image requires than Ballard’s official mediators in publishing. Perhaps the most striking demonstration of the perspicacity of Ballard’s fans can be seen…
Read Moreby Allen Mozek Selected Poems: 1963-1973, David Antin, Sun & Moon Classics, 431 pp. Not thought, but thinking. We spend so much time grappling with thought itself that we often shortchange the process of thinking. An impenetrability congeals somewhere in that interzone between the noun and verb. Thought becomes a hardened pit of matter –…
Read MoreFrom Slate: The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states—other species, such as chimps, dogs, scrub jays and dolphins, may have some modest capacity in this regard. But there’s absolutely no question that we’re much better at it than the rest…
Read MoreFrom Lapham’s Quarterly: Intricate and subtle technologies for attaching fame to persons both mortal and divine now serve commodities and their personification in brands. The icons of Andy Warhol, raised in the Eastern Orthodox church, register the equivalence which modern strategies of public relations, propaganda, and advertising have established between brands (Brillo and Campbell’s), entertainers,…
Read MoreVladimir Potanin in Кандидат or Kandidat by Peter Pomerantsev In 2006 I was invited to take part in one of the great adventures of modern broadcasting – conquering the booming Russian television market. The company I was hired by, Potemkin Productions, had been founded by Tim, a British executive producer, and Ivan, a Russian entrepreneur…
Read MoreThe Office, NBC From The Believer: (12) On an episode of The Office, Pam sets up Michael with her friend Julie. As Michael and Julie get to know each other, Michael asks her about her work. Julie says, “I’m an ESL teacher.” Michael says, “Really? See, I didn’t think you could teach that. I thought…
Read More19th Century Songyé Sculpture, Musée du quai Branly From Books & Ideas: Recently, Brigitte Derlon and Monique Jeudy-Ballini have ignored the tribes of Papua New Guinea on which they are experts in order to carry out research on the world of Parisian primitive art collectors. Their book, it should be said, fills a gap in…
Read MoreFrom Five Chapters: When Jacob still thought that he might end up there, he visited Will for a weekend at Harvard. This was the winter of Jacob’s junior year, when life at home had started to feel like something worth leaving behind, and college — any college — loomed like an oasis on the horizon. …
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 Juliana Adelman In theory, there is nothing more exciting for the academic than to find that her work has actually been read by someone and even, gasp, cited! It is less exciting, however, to discover it being mustered in the cause of intelligent design. Someone in cyberspace has seized upon an article of mine…
Read MoreFrom The Quarterly Conversation: Tun-huang (1959) is perhaps Inoue’s greatest novel in his greatest genre. The NYRB edition reprints in the very fine 1978 translation by Jean Oda Moy (also the translator of Inoue’s most personal books in English, Shirobamba and Chronicle of My Mother), which has aged well except for the vexed matter of…
Read MoreAugmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, still, Keiichi Matsuda, 2009 by Greg J. Smith Keiichi Matsuda is a multidisciplinary designer based in London and Tokyo who garnered widespread attention last year for Augmented (hyper)Reality, a speculative video series that explored near-future media environments. His short films Domestic Robocop and Augmented City 3D scrutinize how our experience of home…
Read MoreThe State of Wikipedia not only explores the rich history and inner-workings of the web-based encyclopedia, but it’s also a celebration of its 10th anniversary. With more than 17 million articles in over 270 languages, Wikipedia has undoubtedly become one of the most visited and relied upon sites on the web today. Jimmy Wales…
Read MoreBonnie Parker, circa 1933 by Kathleen Cairns Wanted Women: An American Obsession in the Reign of J. Edgar Hoover, by Mary Elizabeth Strunk, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 304 pp. Female “outlaws” have been a staple of American popular culture at least since the 1830s, when New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett used the murder…
Read MoreFrom Chapati Mystery: Lapata: What do you think about the trend in translation in which a very large number of Indian words are retained in the translation? You have used a fair number of kinship terms, and also, of course, the wonderful bits of onomatopoeia, which work very well with the campy aesthetic of…
Read MoreA Christmas Carol, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1938 by Derek Beaulieu It seems hardly reasonable at first glance to suppose that an entirely new literature might one day—now, for instance—be possible. The many attempts made these last thirty years to drag literature out of its ruts have resulted at best, in no more than isolated works. And—we are…
Read MoreFrom ResetDOC: In a secular and multi-religious environment, faith is constantly subject to learning and supervision leading to a more rigorous search for piousness and higher awareness of one’s faith. I’ll select three different practices of praying that have provoked a public debate to illustrate the specificity of contesting religious practices in a European context.…
Read More
