Category
Reviews
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Use and Reuse: Dancing Again with Robert Rauschenberg
“Looking at the Rauschenberg archives was a revelation to me. I’ve never handled a silkscreen, and physics and geometry weren’t my best subjects in high school, but even I could see how ‘Set and Reset’ could be recreated because of the Rauschenberg studio’s meticulous records management.”
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The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber …
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Encounters with the Thing Formerly Known as Nature
We used to call it nature: forests, lakes, foxes, butterflies, mosquitoes, dandelions. Soils and oceans. Seasonal cycles. Also floods and heat waves and the occasional hurricane. But no more: as Bill McKibben, the environmental writer and activist founder of 350.org, put it back in 1989, climate change implies the end of nature. Nature, McKibben argued,…
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Animal Feelings
We read stories of how, after losing their companions, dogs and bunnies refuse to eat; ducks and horses exhibit nervousness and social anxiety; dolphins strand themselves …
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Democracy in France: The Intellectual Context of Tocqueville’s Masterwork
As the revolutionary age transformed Europe and the New World, among the few prominent instances of global stability, or so it has frequently been asserted, was the special relationship between France and America. The French, after all, were instrumental to the result of the American war for independence;1sk the travelled inhabitant of any nation, In what country…
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Cult Fiction
In the alternate, very recent past of Fiona Maazel’s second novel, Woke Up Lonely, Esme Haas, mistress of disguise and secret agent for the secretive “Department of the Interior,” is tasked with monitoring the Helix, a mysterious and unlikely cult. Originally formed to combat a national epidemic of loneliness and led by the lonely, well-meaning…
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Reinventing Documentary
Forged at the interstice of art history and curatorial practice, T. J. Demos’s The Migrant Image is an ambitious sketch of how politically committed documentary artists—working in film, video, and photography—have responded to uneven capitalist expansion and the migrations impelled by abject poverty, authoritarianism, and armed conflict. The art projects Demos features confront this global…
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Collateral Melancholy
Two children meet by chance on the night of a historic Santiago earthquake, develop a brief, tentative friendship around a secret task that neither of them understands too well, and then, years later, meet up as adults, both attracted and estranged by the silences and intersecting threads that had earlier entangled them. Alejandro Zambra’s third…
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People in Trouble
“My Awesome Place is truly the result of a massive community effort …”1 When the poet and performance artist Cheryl Burke died at the age of 38 from complications related to the treatment of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, friends and members of her writing group brought her unfinished memoir to publication. The book, which was awarded a Lambda Literary…
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Characters of Concealment
In his 2002 New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult,” Jonathan Franzen identified William Gass as a prominent member of a group including the likes of William Gaddis, Robert Coover, and John Barth that Franzen had once, but no longer, aspired to join. This “canon of intellectual, socially edgy, white-male American fiction writers … shared the postmodern…
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Megalopolis Now
It is no surprise that New York City, immodestly known as “the capital of the world,” figures so strongly in the popular imagination of apocalypse: think of the submerged Statue of Liberty in the ecodisaster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004). But New York’s iconicity, as a prime example of what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls…
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Calcutta’s Via Negativa
Amit Chaudhuri is, as is perhaps not widely enough recognized, the author of five remarkable novels, as well as a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, a work of academic literary criticism, and a volume of critical reviews and essays. (He is also a musician and composer of some note.) At one time…
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Class Diaries: Reflections on Michael Apted’s Up Series
The British documentary film Seven Up!, broadcast for the first time in 1964, was originally intended to be a single, stand-alone program. Made by Granada Television for the current affairs program World in Action, it focused on 14 seven-year-old children from a variety of backgrounds across England. According to Paul Almond, the director of the…
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Don’t Throw Anything Out
First, a disclaimer. I am too old to review this book. It aims to address media scholars, communication professionals, as well as active and curious members of the new participatory culture. I belong in the first category, but I hardly qualify as part of the third. I decided to continue nevertheless, because the book proposes…
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All About the Clothes
Though Grace Coddington is well-known in her native Britain by lovers of London’s Swinging Sixties, most Americans only learned who she was from the 2009 documentary about the making of Vogue’s annual landmark, The September Issue. This despite the fact that she has worked at American Vogue since 1988, and arrived there on the same…
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Naples into Words
In My Brilliant Friend, the fourth and most recent novel by Elena Ferrante to be translated into English, all by Ann Goldstein, Naples provides the absorbing backdrop to the narrator-protagonist Elena Greco’s memories of childhood and adolescence. The first volume of a proposed trilogy, the novel focuses on two young girls growing up in the…
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Marie NDiaye: One Powerful Writer
If you have ever had an uneasy dream in which every word and gesture shimmers with meaning just beyond your grasp, the kind of dream in which the most familiar interactions become strangely entangled in a web of guilt and shame, then you have some sense of what it feels like to read Marie NDiaye.…
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Bringing Outsiders In
Nothing about outsider art is simplistic. Applications of the term “outsider” to art are almost always accompanied by lengthy disclaimers about why it’s being used, its limitations, its dissatisfying imprecision. The genre as a whole is hard to define: united by the notion that the artists are self-taught, it nevertheless represents a wide range of techniques…
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For Now and for Nao
Both of the protagonists in Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, set out to tell one story and wind up telling another. “Ruth”—like the book’s author a novelist living on an island in …
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A Heike for the Ages
The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), often referred to as Japan’s “epic,” is the subject of a lively new translation by Royall Tyler, the preeminent translator of Japanese classics. A work on par with the early 11th-century Tale of Genji for its national cultural significance, the Heike is an account of the Genpei War…
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Found in Translation: Franco-Belgian Comics in America (Part 1)
I first encountered French-language comics at age twelve while visiting my best friend’s grandparents at their farm in the south of France. There, on an attic shelf, we found a stack of Astérix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke. The books appeared almost talismanic effect to me, not least because, well, they were books. It was 1978,…
