Nicole Seymour is fed up with sanctimoniousness, with judgment, and ...
Tag: Nonfiction
Inside and Out in Paris and France
A year ago I was a recent college grad living in Toulouse, in southern France. My generous host family ...
Tabloid War, Class War
Respectability is overrated. Or so said Gawker, the influential, controversial, and luridly entertaining news and gossip site that was forced to close in 2016. Covering stories that other media ...
How Did Humanism Die? How Did It Survive?
In 2019, the idea of “humanism” feels passé. If humanism means “universally shared values,” or “progress,” or an exceptionalism based on the power of ...
Public Thinker: T. L. Taylor on Gamergate, Live-Streaming, and Esports
The qualitative sociologist T. L. Taylor is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and cofounder and director of research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to ...
Bearing Risks and Being Watched
If two features define contemporary capitalism, they are first the tendency of each individual to increasingly bear alone the risks associated with living in a ...
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics ...
Turkey’s “Ghost Empire”
A Turkish academic I once met in a provincial Anatolian city insisted to me that Turkey is a country where a lot goes unsaid, a place where much is buried, and where fairy tales are told to hide a ...
India’s Youth: Small Chances, Big Dreams
The first time someone recommended Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World to me, I rolled my eyes at the title. I wondered ...
The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it ...
“Hopelessness Makes Possible a New Hope”
Though it’s more than a hundred miles from the coast, during the early evening of October 29, 2012, my apartment in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had the salty ...
What Essays Are, and What Essayists Do
There are no good books about essays, only essays. The first practitioner of the form, the 16th-century French politician and minor aristocrat Michel de ...
Public Thinker: David Blight on Frederick Douglass, Abolition, and Memory
Puzzling out the meaning of the Civil War and its aftermath has been David Blight’s lifelong work ...
Michelle Obama’s Embrace
I told Michelle Obama that I admired Becoming for its courage, honesty, risk taking, and optimism. But my admiration went further, because in her story I had seen myself, and not just in the book’s main character ...
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...
Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?
I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that ...
Birth of a Mother
What exactly is motherhood? I’ve been mulling it over the past few months, during which time I again experienced pregnancy and childbirth, and again dealt with the confusion and sleep deprivation ...
Are Sharp Women Enough?
Twitter was a medium made for Dorothy Parker—alas, a century too late. Her famous poem “Resumé” is 141 characters. Her breakout feature in Vanity Fair, a series of Hate Songs, begs for a hashtag ...
The State Will Not Save Us
In policy circles today, the primacy of the capitalist state in efforts to confront climate change is a given. This is a premise worth questioning.
Why an Age of Machine Learning Needs the Humanities
It isn’t easy to be a citizen in 2018. We are told to watch out for bots and biased ...
