“There is nothing supreme about being white.”
Tag: Love
The Metalyrical Moment
Three recent poetry collections have cemented the rise of what we might call the “metalyrical”: poetry that interrogates the conditions of its own expression.
Quit Playing Games with My Heart
Robert first catches my eye from across the coffee shop. New to the neighborhood, I’m looking for a friendly face. But Robert—glaring back at me from over his mug ...
Translators and Other Icons
Writers are sexy figures. Until recently, we tended to imagine them as drunk and glamorous, Hemingway at the bar in Cuba or Frank O’Hara partying with artists ...
Muses Explain Things to Me
The feminist muse is an artist, too. No silent sitter, she swaps the easel-facing chaise for a work space wholly hers, sloughing off the obligation to inspire ...
The Ambivalence of Appropriation
One day in the summer of 2001, English professor and cultural critic Eric Lott received a phone call from rock journalist Greil Marcus. Marcus had some news ...
Queer Your Own Adventure
“BEWARE and WARNING!” So heralds the front page of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, wildly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. “This book is ...
Love in a Broken World
There are now, it seems, more ways than ever for a woman to reach or ruin her own potential. Mainstream feminism today hinges upon a vision of woman as rational actor capable of logically and ...
Wild States of Being
A lacquered blue cube and a cat named Labes: these nonhuman characters shed unforgiving light on human frailty in the wrenching new novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone, Ties, scrupulously ...
The Book That Made Me: Learn How to Love
The Book That Made Me is a series about the books that have changed our lives. In this inaugural installment, a National Book Award–winning historian …
Workplace Romances
Do what you love. Most American 20- or 30-somethings have heard this helpful tidbit of career counseling at one time or another in the course of our lives. Like many adages, this one is dangerous: it ...
Foucault and the Fictocritics
For at least three decades, starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault was a phenomenon nearly comparable to the Beatles, or his predecessor on the academic scene, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a history of ...
The Bingewatch: “Love” Angeles
Despite today’s abundance of “quality television” programming, TV has yet to fully shed its reputation as a degraded medium. Why else would the binge have taken hold as a (if not the) prime metaphor ...
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes ...
A Lesbian “Carol” for Christmas
As we approach the crest of film awards season frenzy, Carol, Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, still in limited release, has captured the imagination of ...
Ferrante, in History
What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) Now that the Neapolitan ...
Status Updates
How do we read Tumblr pages, Facebook updates, and Instagram feeds for plot? What sorts of narrators do social media enable and promote? The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty by Amanda Filipacchi ...
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 ...
Why “Looking” Bothered Me
In March, after the end of its second season and a few days of intense speculation, the death knell was sounded for HBO’s Looking, the only recent series on American television with a central cast ...
Love Story
Romeo and Juliet, War and Peace, Wuthering Heights, Portrait of a Lady, Death in Venice: love stories—sublime, tormented, star-crossed or otherwise—are the bread and butter of the Western literary ...