Tag: Masculinity

John Williams’s Perfect Anti-Western

Canyonlands National Park, Utah; 103ºF under a cloudless summer sky. I’d call the canyon floor below “bone-white,” if it looked like anything had ever lived there long enough to leave its bones ...

Shakespeare in 2016

Over the last four centuries, we’ve reinvented Shakespeare to suit our purposes, much as Shakespeare borrowed from his past to do the same.1 2016 commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of ...

The Bonds of the Sea

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...