What do war journalism and surfing have in common? On the face of it, not much: surfing is a frivolous pastime and war reporting a humanitarian endeavor to shine a light on violent conflict in ways ...
Tag: Masculinity
A Muslim Future to Come?
The devastating attacks of November 13 on Paris’s 10th and 11th arrondissements viciously targeted the “progressive” heart of the city. When I am there, that is where I live. Like many other ...
Why Boys Must Cry
In contemporary Nigerian literature, muscular heroes of postcolonial independence have lost their swagger. Today’s patriarchs read like quaint fogies, stomping their feet about government, money, and ...
Double Dirty Work: Sex Research and Symbolic Contamination
“Your skin is very dark,” a hostess in a Ho Chi Minh City bar complains to sociologist Kimberly Hoang. The woman has taken Hoang under her wing to help her become desirable to the bar’s Vietnamese ...
Virtual Roundtable on “Transparent”
Jill Soloway’s original program Transparent abounds with firsts: the first TV series to feature a transgender character as its protagonist; the first transgender-themed series to win Golden Globe ...
Is That All There Is?
“Is That All There Is?” became a hit for Peggy Lee in August 1969, the month that followed the July 29 moon landing featured so prominently at the end of the first half of Season 7. Though not much ...
Plastic Fantasies
The doll lies, tranquil, her nude body pale and her vulva hairless and unnatural. Her hand prominently clutches a lamp, but her head is just out of sight. A tendril of blond hair draws the eye ...
Linklater’s Gooey Realism
Richard Linklater’s acclaimed Boyhood is an ambitious film about a Texas boy named Mason, a millennial everyman played by Ellar Coltrane, as he matures from ages 6 to 18. Along the way, he proceeds ...
Return to the Fold
At first glance, Rectify may seem like another variation on that favorite TV conceit of recent years: a damaged, asocial male struggles to reconcile with the modern world (see Breaking Bad, Mad Men ...
Futurist Cheerfulness
In the domain of games and toys, as in all passéist manifestations, one sees only grotesque imitation, timidity (miniature trains, little cars, dolls that can’t move, cretinous caricatures of ...
“We” Includes Me
In my world, which is populated by people obsessed with race, statistics about black men and boys are ubiquitous. Study after study lays out how few graduate from high school, how many wind up in ...
Conversion Sickness
“Nathaniel P. is George Eliot. Nathaniel P. is Tolstoy.” Thus proclaimed a friend of mine in adulation of young novelist Adelle Waldman’s widely acclaimed debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P ...
The Joys of Multiplicity
Translation contains multitudes. Since there is no one right way to translate most things worth translating—though there are many wrong ways—translation opens up a sphere of multiplicity in which you ...
Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from ...
Wanting Out
I can remember the first time I met Mark Anthony Neal. I was a graduate student, and he was visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching a class entitled “(Il)Legible Blackness.” The ...
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 ...
A Conversation with Ellis Avery
Set in 1927 Paris, The Last Nude is inspired by the Russo-Polish Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young woman who modeled for her most famous painting, Beautiful Rafaela. De Lempicka met ...