Across the slatted border between the United States and Mexico, near Ciudad Juárez, the artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello recently installed several ...
Print/Screen
Editor: Leah Price
The Posthuman Enlightenment
What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these ...
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 ...
Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how ...
How Does Copyright Matter?
Copyright as we know it is a surprisingly recent development. It has been with us just a few decades—only as long, roughly, as Hello Kitty and the Star Wars ...
“Everyone Writes Stories”
In the old days, people used to talk about gaming the system. It meant manipulating the rules to produce a desired outcome. The term was popularized by software ...
Newspapers and Northern Lights
In 1818 John Ross pointed the ship Isabella toward the Northwest Passage and opened up the Arctic exploration mania; the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of ...
Toward an Ecological Cinema
In France, a recent legislative bill identified the task of bringing about “corporate transformation” as one of the major challenges of the 21st century ...
From Slate to Silicon?
Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony ...
Physical Books, Digital Lives
“On or around December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously said, “human character changed.” If my memories of December 2010 serve, that’s when social media ...
The Book Is a Time Machine
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious ...
Adoption Anxieties
Given the overall paucity of novels about interracial adoption, it is striking that no fewer than three were published in 2017. In general, reviewers warmly received Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy, Lisa ...
Reading with Strangers
On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications ...
Digital Lies, Real Ghosts
We’ve all obsessed over someone who isn’t there: fictional characters, an absent lover, the dead. The verb “obsess” means to haunt, harass, or torment, as an evil spirit. But we are usually the ...
The Material Life of Criticism
Three new histories of literary study draw attention to the critic’s material life. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, by Joseph North, Paraliterary ...
Reading as Inoculation
Filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith has a few books to recommend. Her Human_3.0 Reading List, on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 29, contains 57 drawings ...
Is Handwriting History?
Have you got a pen? My answer to such a question, following some clumsy digging in my backpack, is increasingly no. Sometimes, embarrassment giving way to defensiveness, I wonder why anyone bothers ...
When Books Had Chains, and Pages Were Illuminated
In a side room of the Boston College site of the three-part exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections ...
Audio Companions
Some years back, the cultural critic Stephen Metcalf noted, in a smart review of a new essay collection by David Sedaris, that we turn to radio for companionship. Companionship might appear to be ...
Books after the Death of the Book
Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach. The title ...