by Julia Wertz In the first panel, I’m reading Lisa Hanawalt’s comics. You should be too. About the Author: Julia Wertz was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1982 and now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she works as a cartoonist and writer. She has published three books, the most recent being Drinking…
Read Moreby Julian Bourg Jean-Paul Sartre and The Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Texts and Contexts) by Jonathan Judaken Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 408 pp. Given the sinuous tale of the distinctive relationship between France and Judaism and especially because the figure of the French intellectual was born through the…
Read Moreby Russell Bennetts Simon Ferrari is a doctoral student in digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He recently co-authored Newsgames: Journalism at Play with Ian Bogost and Bobby Schweizer. Simon blogs about gaming at Chungking Expresso. Berfrois What are Newsgames? Are they closer in nature to journalism or video games? Ferrari …
Read MorePhoto by Stephane Le Gal by Gyan Prakash Mumbai Fables, the latest book from historian Gyan Prakash, has been praised by Salman Rushdie as “a fascinating exploration of my favourite city, full of insider knowledge and sharp insights.” Here Prakash explains the genesis of the book and the upcoming film adaptation, Bombay Velvet. Mumbai Fables was…
Read MoreFrom The New York Review of Books: There have been other comic strips that dealt with politics, but they did so sporadically, and as one-trick diversions—Al Capp satirizing the welfare state with his schmoos, Walt Kelly turning Senator Joseph McCarthy into Simple J. Malarkey—but Trudeau has reflected on politics at a depth and with a…
Read MoreFrom Sign and Sight: The Internet gives us the means to free ourselves from the clutches of the self-proclaimed cultural intercessors and delegates and to chose our own cultural heritage. This makes the old cultural industry nervous, as does the fact that the dissemination of information is taking place so incredibly more efficiently and inexpensively…
Read Moreby Fabio Camilletti This essay analyses the relationship between the uncanny and time by focusing on the notion of ‘time-slip’ as reflected in three American novels of the 1970s: Jack Finney’s Time and Again, Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return and Stephen King’s The Shining. Through a comparative analysis of these texts, the essay inquires into the…
Read Moreby Russell Bennetts Nick Salvato is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Cornell University. His first book, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance will be published by Yale University Press at the end of November. Currently Nick is working on a second book, tentatively entitled Performing Waste Management: A Century of Trash Aesthetics. Berfrois What…
Read MoreFrom The Smithsonian: Some of the most successful zombie-masters are fungi from the genus Ophiocordyceps. The parasites infest many kinds of arthropods—from butterflies to cockroaches—but it is among ants that the fungi’s ability to control other beings’ behavior is most apparent. One prototypical scenario is found in Costa Rica, where infected bullet ants (Paraponera clavata)…
Read MoreBrenda Song as Christy Lee in The Social Network From New York Review of Books: How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus…
Read MoreFrom Ploughshares: On the radio, they were calling it “snow-mageddon.” Joan had seen it on the news, as well, in a Doppler radar swirl that looked like a green hurricane, pulsing like a sick heart over the Cascade Mountains. The worst of it was supposed to hit tomorrow, midday, but already the snow had begun…
Read Moreby Markha Valenta Cas Mudde was quite right to point out recently how liberal arguments are being used in the interests of illiberal attacks on Muslims. However, in the Dutch case this reflects anything but a progressive national consensus It is rather striking, at first sight, to note how much the Dutch politician Geert Wilders…
Read MoreFrom The New York Review of Books: The Republican opposition has been highly successful in turning “stimulus” and “bailout” into dirty words that cannot be used. The opposition narrative blames the crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession and persistent high unemployment on the ineptitude of government and claims that the 2009 stimulus package was…
Read Moreby Bruce High Quality Foundation Via The Paris Review Daily
Read MoreThe first thing to be said is that to define Modernism in any way at all is to take a stand. In that it is like Romanticism. You cannot write a ‘history of Romanticism’ or of Modernism, because you cannot stand above it on some neutral vantage-point.
Read Moreby Mike Ettner Nemesis by Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pp. “Nemesis” is an old-fashioned novel. The book has the glow of a twilit, though painful, reminiscence. It is set in the Jewish Weequahic section of Newark during the war year of 1944. Roth imagines the community suffering through a devastating polio epidemic that…
Read MoreEdvard Munch, 1906 From The Philosophers’ Magazine: If you’ve read Thus Spoke Zarathustra or some of Nietzsche’s more aphoristic works, you’ve probably noticed that he had a particular fondness for poetic formulations and lyrical prose. What you might not know, however, is that Nietzsche wrote almost three hundred poems and aphorisms, which are collected…
Read MoreTo the Swedish Friends: Latvia’s hope in 1990 was that advice from Western Europe would be to help Latvia emulate its successful mixed economies and embark on the same path that had raised living standards and a balanced international trade and payments. And by opening the economy to Swedish and other Western European banks,…
Read MoreBy Daniel Goldstein From The Chronicle Review: From industry-backed research to CEO-style executive salaries and perquisites, the influence of corporate America on universities has been the subject of much popular and scholarly scrutiny. University libraries have largely escaped that attention. Yet libraries, the intellectual heart of universities, have become perhaps the most commercialized academic area…
Read Moreby A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz [This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk.] “I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in…
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