The obituaries are striving to strike the properly respectful note, but with Philip Roth that was always going to be a challenge. The New York Times highlights Roth’s interest in masturbation, and ...
Tag: Violence
Gun Studies Syllabus
In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control ...
The Big Picture: Violence and Free Speech
On August 11 and 12, white nationalists came to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live and work. The rally exposed many things, among them some of the challenges that Trumpism poses for ...
The Big Picture: Gun Culture
The day after the Las Vegas shooting, Mark Romano called me up to tell me that Donald Trump was bad for his business. “Don’t get me wrong, I love him,” Mark clarified, reiterating his earlier ...
The Big Picture: Protest, Violent and Nonviolent
Contemporary protests renew debates about whether or not violence is justified, raising questions about what even counts as violence. The demonstrations planned by right-wing groups for late August ...
The Bingewatch: #Resist
After November’s election, I only wanted to watch normporn. Craving fallible yet manicured characters whose gaffes—provoked by pain mired in class privilege—always culminated in tear-jerking ...
The Fog of the Drug War
It is almost impossible to know exactly what happens when a crime is committed in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. The basic questions often cannot be answered: Who is the victim? Who ...
B-Sides: John Galt’s “Annals of the Parish”
For 30 or 40 years a book has been lurking on my shelves, a beautiful little Everyman’s Library edition published by Dent and Dutton, undated, with red fake leather binding …
The Model-Minority Bubble
Perhaps the most famous shopping trip in American literature can be found in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Wounded by a colleague’s unflattering assessment of his appearance, Jack Gladney ...
The Mundane And Extraordinary Aspects Of Black Women’s History: An Interview With Kali Nicole Gross
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. This month I interviewed Kali Nicole Gross about her ...
Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an ...
Live Through This
I used to refer to my dark times as the IWTDs, when the mental refrain I want to die so dominated my thoughts that I took to writing the acronym in the margins of books I was reading. It was a huge ...
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 ...
Sex, Violence, and “The Vegetarian”
The verdict is in. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian has not only received glowing praise from British and American literary supplements; it has become the first Korean novel to be shortlisted for a Booker ...
Orange Alert
In our post-9/11 era, the phrase “national security” has become all too familiar. A simple Google search yields over 361,000,000 results, ranging from the National Security Council homepage to op-eds ...
Impunity
Human skin turns the color of lead as the body loses blood. It’s one of the physical signs, perceivable at plain sight in a homicide victim, marking the boundary between life and death. Another is ...
Life After Wartime
Fisher House looks like any other suburban American home: a well-manicured lawn; a kitchen stocked with Girl Scout cookies, Maseca, and ice cream; a living room with a flat-screen TV and children’s ...
The Woolf Girl
Pity the small back of Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach, child victim of the refugee crisis. His photo went viral, sparked outrage; perhaps it will win an award ...
Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see ...
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 ...