Despite using a pseudonym, Ferrante has made clear how readers should understand her work. Should critics listen?
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Skateboarding, We Hardly Knew You
Since its beginnings, skateboarding has always been multicultural—and always provided ways to resist rigid US norms and borders.
Desire Can Pierce Politics: Amia Srinivasan on Sex, Consent, and ...
“Given the long, tainted history of sex under patriarchy, maybe we need reparative norms around sex.”
Art and Culture in Schorske’s Century
With decades of creativity—that ended with World War I—Vienna jolted Western art and culture forward into high modernity. But how?
The Planet Needs Collective Action—not Tech
Digital tech cannot stop climate change merely by “greening” individual consumption.
“You Could Have Changed Everything”
One may as well begin with George Merrill’s touch to E. M. Forster’s backside (“gently, and just above the buttocks,” Forster recalls). It was 1913 ...
Double Dirty Work: Sex Research and Symbolic Contamination
“Your skin is very dark,” a hostess in a Ho Chi Minh City bar complains to sociologist Kimberly Hoang. The woman has taken Hoang under her wing to help her become desirable to the bar’s Vietnamese ...
Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the ...
Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen ...