Before drifting off to sleep, I would read articles about the trial. One strategy of the prosecution was to let the plaintiffs themselves—their personalities, their histories—make a fresh case for the ability of homosexuals to form successful unions. The two halves of the male couple, Zarrillo and Katami, were affable and settled. Zarrillo had grown up in suburban New Jersey and attended the local high school. More…
The thing about losing the Super Bowl is that it’s as much of an event, almost, as winning one. The number of articles written is similar; there is the same amount of anticipatory chatter, the same level of plans made with friends. The difference is just that the season is, if not a failure, exactly, then even more uniquely unsuccessful. Like a bad novel. More…
The last time the Giants faced the Patriots in the Super Bowl, Manning was a figure of frustration for Giants fans. During the 2007 regular season, he’d led the league in interceptions, despite the advantage of a strong running game, and New Yorkers were aching to run the whiny, flakey quarterback out of town. Then he led the Giants on an improbable playoff run. More…
The wife of an activist who died under strange circumstances,/ though more likely than not it was an accident,/ says to me that she literally finds herself shaking/ from everything that’s going on, the arrests and the interrogations of activists . . . / I’m sure you know the story of N, she says./ A labor activist, they planted drugs on him, he got five years. More…
Even though The Stranger’s Child is less titillating than Hollinghurst’s earlier novels, I don’t think this has anything to do with an ideological softening. In fact, for all the playful narrative possibilities of Hollinghurst’s other books, with their non-traditional, non-futural, anti-marriage-plot-like couplings, I’d venture that The Stranger’s Child is oddly more uncompromising in its vision. More…
Daniel Smith and n+1 editor Keith Gessen talk about Gessen’s article for Vanity Fair, “The Book on Publishing” (October 2011). This article uses Chad Harbach’s book The Art of Fielding as a lens to examine developments in print and electronic publishing. Keith and Daniel discuss what these changes mean for the industry, the authors, and the reading public. More…
Blog empire Gawker Media, like its magazine counterparts Conde Nast and Hearst, asks readers to sort themselves by advertising demographic. One might be interested in sports, and read Deadspin. Or one might be interested in being a woman, and read Jezebel. When Jezebel launched, I myself was keenly interested in being a woman. I was 20 years old, and I was curious about the ways it could be done. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 13, featuring Astra Taylor on education outside the school system, Russian poet and activist Kirill Medvedev on the fate of progressive literary culture, an excerpt from Benjamin Kunkel’s new play, a report from Franco Moretti’s literary lab, a collective portrait of the Occupy movement and argument for a left populism, and much more. More…
From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated,and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. More…
Ryan Schreiber launched Pitchfork in November 1995 from his parents’ house in a suburb of Minneapolis. Because the domain name www.pitchfork.com belonged to a company selling livestock out of Butte Falls, Oregon, Schreiber had to settle for www.pitchforkmedia.com. The name, he told BusinessWeek in 2008, was meant to suggest “an angry mob mentality” toward the music industry. More…
The first sign of trouble was a tweet: [at]mcduh: [at]questlove sayin he saw hundreds of riot cops on South St, Manhattan bout 1hr ago. #occupywallst [at]DiceyTroop are yall aware of anything? I immediately crossed Broadway on the south side of Liberty, side-stepping dormant traces of ongoing street maintenance and responding: [at]mcduh [at]questlove all quiet at the Park. What did you see questo? Maybe Batman stuff? More…
I say mystery is the only certainty/ That embracing nothingness/ as hard as you did those big/ bear arms around the dissipating void/ so all the stars squeezed out the sides/ you made Nietzsche look/ like the crybaby punk/ he actually was infected with syphilis/ and so forth who said god/ is dead and remains dead and we/ killed him talk about/ Oedipal guilt, which you/ spat out like an apple’s/ arsenic pit More…
Joe Paterno, football coach, liked to talk about the Aeneid. He gave speeches about heroism and the Aeneid as early as the 1970s. It’s a central motif of his autobiography, Paterno: By the Book, and as recently as 2007, Paterno told GQ that the Aeneid has “probably had as much influence on me as anything in my life.” More…
