Tag
Addiction
-
“Agita”: Talking with Alexander Sammartino
“I feel that way every day of my life: ‘astray in errancy.’ I think that’s about being human.”
-
Oliver’s Body
Some autism spectrum and disability activists have turned, in an age in which Asperger syndrome has come to describe Silicon Valley’s new normal, to a figure of the neuroqueer.1 If queerness came, by the early 1990s, to stand less for specific sexual and gendered identities and more for a general troubling of norms that pathologize and…
-
Let’s All Inhale: Pynchon Goes to the Movies
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Paul Thomas Anderson makes a revealing comment about his artistic choices as a director: “If you can convince yourself that there’s some link to reality, then you can justify anything.”1 He’s talking about the famous “milkshake” line from There Will Be Blood (2007), but he might just as…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Edward St. Aubyn and the Depressive Third Person
Few recent novelists offer as many misguided reasons for being liked or disliked than Edward St. Aubyn, whose five Patrick Melrose novels—Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mother’s Milk (2006), and At Last (2011, published in the United States in early 2012)—have been the occasion of some glowing press. Sensationalism is the…
-
Can Objects Be Evil?
Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and objects that deepens practical and philosophical questions about the capacities of players interacting with machines designed…
