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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To Lose Everything (To War)
“What is it like to lose everything?” the young protagonist of Stephen Dau’s first novel, The Book of Jonas, is asked again and again by those hoping to fathom his experience of losing his entire family and village, in an unnamed Muslim country, to an American attack. And one day, writes Dau, “sitting in plastic…
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Animal Studies
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, without turning into a beast. In Lydia Millet’s Magnificence, a widow feeling guilty about her husband’s death compares herself to a taxidermy display of stuffed carnivores. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a blonde dream girl fakes her own kidnapping, slaughters her ex-boyfriend in flagrante, and threatens to abort…
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War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via newsreels, books, or folksongs, are now available for immediate consumption anywhere, anytime. But is anyone watching? Recent wars have proven to…
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Books, Not MOOCs
So you’ve been browsing around online, and here you are. You’re on the couch, or you’re eating lunch, or you’re in transit, or you’re in the back of the classroom, or you’re at your desk, attending a virtual class that sounded like a good idea when you started but that hasn’t really captured your attention.…
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Sequester This!: The Perils of Masculinity and The Truth About Sex
It’s hard to be a man these days. For years, men enjoyed the trappings of hegemony unencumbered by guilt, reproach, or self-loathing. Men smoked like Don Draper, drank like Foster Brooks, and drove like Jimmy Dean. The world was theirs, and they paved American roads as pathways to their enjoyment. Men worked hard and dallied…
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Counterpower’s Long Game
“This is the Beginning of the Beginning” flashed in white light on Manhattan’s Verizon Building. The message seemed to jump out of nowhere and Occupy Wall Street marchers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge broke into ecscatic chants. This was the Illuminator’s debut, just two days after New York police had brutally evicted Occupiers from Zuccotti Park.…
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Hollowgram
Make a left at the corner, head down the road about six miles, make a couple of quick rights, and you’re there: the plant of Thomson-Shore, printer of Dave Eggers’s new novel, A Hologram for the King. At least, that’s where you’ll be if you start out from the spot where I am typing these…
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Memoir 2.0; or, Confession Gone Wild
Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s first confessional memoir—unless, of course, you count her name. As Strayed recalls about a third of the way through Wild, she authored that briefest of autobiographies on a set of no-fault divorce papers in 1994. Obsessed by the blank line where she was to write her new name, she toyed with…
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Game of Chance
The narrator of Alexandra Chasin’s novella, Brief, displays a close rhetorical kinship with Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. An art vandal of indeterminate gender, s/he defends an act of destruction inflicted on a work in the “midtown temple of Modern Art” through verbal flourishes that rival, and sometimes directly echo, the nymphet-lover’s pleas to his readers…
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Social Change Sensibilities
In Sensible Politics, Meg McLagan, a cultural anthropologist and independent filmmaker, and Yates McKee, a writer and scholar, provide an intriguing collage of essays and interviews by scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and architects that explore the inextricable linkages between visual culture and nongovernmental politics. In the introduction to this edited volume, McLagan and McKee write:…
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To Chuck or Not to Chuck
Cricket has a certain charge in writings on the postcolonial world as a site of political contestation between decolonized subjects and their former colonial masters. Scholars such as C. L. R. James, Arjun Appadurai, and Simon Gikandi have written of cricket as a central part of the “colonial ecumene” (Appadurai) in India and the West…
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Don’t Say “Etc.”: Lost and Found in the Work of Ivan Vladislavic
In a piece titled “Practical exercises,” Georges Perec gives some instructions on how to set down a city street in words: Note down what you can see. … Don’t say, don’t write “etc.” Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything,…
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Into the Crud
How can a book transform how we think about the human? It is one thing to claim for oneself, as does a character in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a dispossession so thorough that she lives with “No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity,” prompting her father to add, “like a dog.” It…
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Nuclear Graphics
One of the most challenging aspects of nuclear politics today is the simultaneous invisibility of nuclear things and their ever-presentness. Radiation, of course, is invisible to human senses, but nevertheless presents a constant challenge to health and safety at all nuclear sites. Similarly, while the atomic bomb is hidden behind elaborate systems of state secrecy,…
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Love Among the Ruins
The action in The Dog Stars, Peter Heller’s first novel, is confined to a small area of postapocalyptic Colorado, nine years after a superflu outbreak has killed off the vast majority—“ninety nine point whatever”—of the human population. Hig, the succinctly named forty-one-year-old protagonist, spends his days in the sky, patrolling the perimeter of his fortified encampment…
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Virtual Panel on Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats
Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin, 2012) was published to high acclaim and controversy in the fall. At the live Public Books panel in December, Freeland joined three distinguished scholars of economic inequality to discuss the causes and consequences of the new global super-rich…
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Arts of Security
Being “against security” would be absurd in a place like Colombia, where my research is based. People from all over the country have suffered through decades of armed conflict only to now face new threats to their lives and livelihoods. Since the mid-1980s, the capital city of Bogotá has received close to a million internal…
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Attacking Love
Valentine’s Day evokes thoughts of love … and perhaps disgust. Revulsion arises in response to commercialization and the pressure to express meaningful attachment. But the disgust may also stem from an inherent discomfort with the practice of love in contemporary American life. French public intellectual and philosopher Alain Badiou’s interview-turned-essay In Praise of Love describes…
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Fatwa: A Love Story
Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton, is much like his career to date: great until about halfway through. One ought to feel worse about taking such a cheap shot. Over the last three decades, Rushdie has been one of the finest novelists working in English. The loose tetralogy that began with Midnight’s Children (1981) and…
