Category
Essays
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Law, Written in Spray Paint
“Paying attention to the temporary markings etched onto the asphalt, we are afforded a glimpse into the otherwise hidden world that lies below the city’s surface.”
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A Sit-In in the House of Representatives
I was fortunate enough, as an intern this summer for Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX-33), to witness last week’s historic sit-in by Democrats on the House floor. I was at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee when the sit-in began Wednesday morning. At one point I realized that there was only one Democrat left…
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Warren Zevon’s Desperado Pessimism
May 10th, 2016 marked the 40th anniversary of the hardest, truest, saddest, sickest pop-rock album you’ve never heard. Maybe you listened to it in 1976 if you read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson, or saw the Everly Brothers on tour, or loved the Turtles. Otherwise you probably missed Warren Zevon’s self-titled second album. Like…
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The Thread
1 Sometime during my senior year of high school, my mother went on a laundry strike. Her goal, as I understood it, was to get my father to pick his underwear up off the bathroom floor, carry them to the hamper, and eventually wash them. She made my brother and I promise not to help…
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Placerita Canyon
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. North of Los Angeles, there is a canyon. It was once occupied by Tataviam Native Americans who hunted and gathered across it until the area was claimed, first by the Mexican government, then the United States. And there, in…
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15 Great Book-to-TV Adaptations to Watch This Summer
It’s a good time to be a novelist if you dream of seeing your work on the small screen. So far this year, Showtime has picked up Ben Stiller’s adaptation of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Amazon Studios ordered a pilot from Jill Soloway based on Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and Europe’s…
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F(r)iction in Translation
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. There isn’t, a priori, a kinship between literary thrillers and thrillers about literature. Idra Novey’s debut novel, Ways to Disappear, however, seems…
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Traveling the Camino de la Muerte: Floreana, Galápagos Islands
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. There are only two roads in Floreana, Galápagos Islands. One goes along the coast for about a half mile. The other travels six miles up to the base of one of the extinct volcanoes on the island. Neither…
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The New Working Class
Tamara Draut is a policy expert and social critic based at Demos, a progressive think tank. Her latest book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, calls attention to the …
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Graphic Novels for MBAs
Over the course of the two-year program at Harvard Business School, an MBA student will read over five hundred case studies. They range in length from a single page to over 50, but their format is typically the same: a description of an ambiguous scenario that forces students to read actively and decide for themselves…
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Jeffrey Combs’s Re-Animator
The first scene of the Stuart Gordon’s 1985 cult classic Re-Animator shows us our lead, our anti-hero protagonist, in a state of panic. In the halls of the stately University of Zurich, Herbert West has experimented on his mentor, who is now a screaming, pulsating aberration, a physical monstrosity. West, played by stage actor Jeffrey…
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Cheese in Your Bones: The Sheep and Shepherds of Pag
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The island of Pag, which protrudes into the Adriatic like an accusing finger, has more sheep than people. A thin bridge perched across a stretch of sea connects it to the Croatian mainland: when one crosses it, the northern…
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Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this dialogue resulted from Rebuild by Design (RBD), an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. To deepen that conversation, RBD…
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Prince’s Erotic Democracy
In the 1980s, in the shadow of AIDS, Prince (along with Madonna) brought post-disco polymorphous perversity to the mainstream. As Richard Kim beautifully put it in The Nation last week, “If you were …
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Hirado, the End of the World
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The journey from Tokyo to the island of Hirado, just off the coast of Nagasaki prefecture on the southern tip of Japan, is a long one. First the bullet train to Fukuoka, then a slower one to Sasebo,…
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Can You Name the Authors of these Poems about April?
National Poetry Month is in full swing! We’ve combed through our poetry anthologies for allusions to April. Can you match the lines to their authors?
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An Interview with Former Black Panther Lynn French
Lynn French was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968–1973, working in Chicago, Berkeley, and Oakland. In the Party, she worked in newspaper circulation, labor …
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Don Justo and the Never-Ending Cathedral: Mejorada del Campo, Spain
The 21st-century traveler is chronically late: the cathedrals are all built, or, if by some historical accident left unfinished, buried under …
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Alone on the Montague Plains
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Drive a few miles above the legal speed limit on Lake Pleasant Road, and you’re likely to miss the Montague Plains, unaware that the area is more than just passing scenery on the connector road between the villages…
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Binomial Nomenclature
The series Binomial Nomenclature began inauspiciously at a meeting a few years ago, when I scribbled a likeness of a colleague’s rather perfect nose on my printed conference agenda. I labeled it “Roman nose,” and then added the meta-label “Kinds of Noses.” Paying more attention to the faces around me than to the words in…
