Category
Essays
-
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.”
-
Liberal Arts: A Safe Space?
Lydia Davis has a wonderful short story called “Idea for a Sign,” in which she explores the dynamic of social settings where people who don’t know one another must sit side-by-side, as on a train. Davis suggests that it would be easier if everyone wore signs explaining exactly what they will and will not do…
-
Ann Arbor, Michigan: Bricks and Bread
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In the 1970s, Ann Arbor, Michigan smelled like sorghum, carob, and tamari, breathed out onto the streets from the Sun Bakery and the People’s Food Co-op. Downtown Ann Arbor, such as it was, ran from the University of…
-
Twenty-Six Horses
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. It begins with a false start followed by a wrong turn, despite our being equipped with a GPS and topo maps. Which,…
-
On Cicadas
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. I stand outside to smoke a cigarette. I walk from my car to a store. I…
-
On Spectacle and Silence
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle 1 We sat on the couch together. The burble-voiced sportscasters, the referee’s whistle, “First down and 10.” I was, I am tethered to my father. His fingers…
-
Jersey Cape: Bulk Pick-Up Day
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. With the arrival of summer, weekly visitors descend on this quiet beach town, settling happily into modest beach side bungalows and quaint, dune-nestled Victorian cottages. Those with their own vacation places take up residence with a flurry of…
-
A Letter to My Children about the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Obamacare
Want help in explaining the significance of the recent Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare to your kids? In what follows, a former Supreme Court law clerk, top appellate litigator …
-
A Letter to My Children about the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Marriage Equality
Many parents struggle with how to talk to their kids about marriage equality. In what follows, a former Supreme Court law clerk, top appellate litigator …
-
In Fez: The Art-Dealer’s Dar
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. “There are seven main families of Fez. I am an Idris,” claimed the salesman at Ali’s Art Gallery, also known as Dar (house) Benhayoune. Located in Fez’s medina—one of the best preserved medieval cities in the Islamic world—and…
-
Genre Wars, Amazon, and the Market for Heart: Where Do We Go From Here?
In the past year in books, two conversations made a descent into debate—one about genre, and the other about Amazon—without necessarily being cast as two sides of the same story. It is a portrait of the writer c. 2015, who faces new realities, a multiverse of post-apocalypses, and a punishing numbers game. In a sense it…
-
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking
At Loyola University New Orleans I teach a seminar on David Foster Wallace—a class I designed at the urging of several students. One day late in the semester we were tackling Wallace’s very short story “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Four students in the class immediately and enthusiastically declared that they had read and discussed this…
-
Gates
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. At dusk we find the cave entrance buried in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The…
-
Outtakes for Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”
In Satin Island, the novel’s narrator, an anthropologist, succumbs to a vivid fever dream in which he finds himself flying offshore over an island—an “excrescence, a protuberance”—of waste, runoff, sewage, detritus, crude oil … a beautiful and corrupted “satin island.” So, on the jacket: an archipelago of oil; a ballistic aftermath of ink; a Triste…
-
International Forum on the Novel 2015: Keywords
Each year, the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France, invites authors to write about a “keyword” of their choice. The following texts are drawn from this year’s forum, presented by the Villa Gillet and Le Monde in partnership with France Inter and Les Subsistances (Lyon). The full list of participating English-language writers and…
-
The Audre Lorde Archive: Kreuzberg, Berlin
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. 1. The Chocolate Factory Women’s Center. The Schokoladenfabrik. In the basement, the Hamam, a women’s-only Turkish bathhouse. On the second floor, furniture-building workshops take place. 2. Walking there each morning, I begin to recognize young families by their…
-
Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. I lunched with the Vice President for Global Centers three days ago and told him, only half in…
-
Crossing the Line in Baltimore
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Greenmount Avenue is a historic Baltimore street running downtown to the Inner Harbor and north to York, PA. There’s a famous cemetery and several renowned churches with congregations and choirs from across the city. The northern section between…
-
Reading Charlie Hebdo across the Atlantic
Like many French citizens, I have never purchased a copy of Charlie Hebdo, the provocative satirical newspaper whose cartoonists were tragically massacred by jihadists earlier this year. A struggling publication with a limited readership, Charlie Hebdo has received extensive attention lately due to its willingness to publish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad that some people…
-
Thérésa Tallien’s Legacy: Style on the rue de Babylone
Since the 18th century, the rue de Babylone has been a site for salons that bring the haute monde into contact with innovative artists …
-
“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group of disaffected and delusional youth; this was another instantiation of a primeval war of civilizations extending far beyond the Île-de-France. Accordingly, grandiose statements about…
