The department’s fellows and one new hire, insular as a Greek chorus, sit at a nearby round table and glance over intermittently. Nola holds her palm above the table’s candle. Sleet mud streaks the ankles of her stockings. A short solemn skirt. A plastic barrette. In certain moments, he’s convinced she needs gifts. Last year, he bought her a computer, a set of dishes, many books . . . More…
Cunningham’s own notes on choreography often look like cave paintings. Stick figures march unevenly across the page, followed by diagrams and phrases, some barely legible, scribbled beside leaning columns of numbers. They communicate the inspired tremor of the hand more than they convey information. More…
I would like to propose a new online course for the Coursera platform. Its title is “The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.” The goal of the course will be to understand the real relation between Coursera’s mission and the logic of the business plan that led Coursera to be named “The Best Startup of 2012.” More…
By 2008, thousands of middle-class and rich people in Juarez, desperate to avoid shakedowns, murders, and kidnappings by cartel hit men, had begun packing up and fleeing to El Paso, where they bought houses and opened businesses. Their migration kept the northern side of the border economically afloat and turned Juarez into a pariah city—or worse, a ghost city that El Pasoans ceased thinking about. More…
The curious position of queer rights in India is this: although it is opposed, it has no clear opponent. The severe social taboo is real enough, but its representatives, when they form up, usually appear as a motley bunch of eccentrics and stodgy clerical officials, shuffling through an unstudied brief against homosexuality. More…
The problem with gringos, Malik said to him one day, is that they don’t know how to make conversation. They share their opinions when they feel authorized to do so, but they don’t know how to sit down and talk about anything just to talk about it, without getting impatient. More…
The fedora is not Monica Lewinsky’s sex-guerrilla beret made sweet with a bow, taking no prisoners with an infantile feminine twist. Nor is it Mary Tyler Moore throwing her beret to the sky—You’re gonna make it after all. We are not sure whether we’re going to make it, in a fedora. More…
San Francisco’s sexual vanguard might overuse words like “consciousness” and “mindfulness,” but the success of their politicization of sex had repercussions that reached across the country. The mind-set could sometimes seem grim, or at least all that talking kind of dampened the feeling of spontaneity. But they meant it: “Polyamory is a decolonizing force,” one person explained to me. “If you want to transform society, it includes our intimate relations.” More…
Sixteen million people in Cairo; I’m told the daytime population is actually more like twenty-two million, struggling to keep their footing on the congested, uneven pavement. A vision of our unsustainable future: too many people, not enough jobs; too many cars, not enough living space; too much refuse, not enough clean water. More…
Cultural resistance to the influence of advertising on popular music may be at a forty-year low, but there is still plenty of music that remains practically if not ideologically detached from “commercial interests.” More…
The cultural nature of politics, the political nature of culture: these have formed the main quandary debated by left intellectuals, mainly among themselves (and there lies much of the trouble), over the twenty some years since the oldest of us went off to colleges where Theory and Cultural Studies were all the impotent rage. More…
They don’t have misomeru (the feeling on first meeting that this is just the person you’ve been looking for), but eventually, in hindsight, they have koi no yokan (the feeling that this is going to tumble into love). But how does one manage vehicular collision on the internet, and why would the prince and the singer have Japanese feelings? Since this is not my story, you don’t have to listen to me rambling on about what I want. More…
Here are some of the words in Mantel’s Cromwell novels: Guiles, argent, couchant. Estoc. Exsanguinates. Fuckeur. There is hunting; there is jousting. There are sconces, velvet cushions, jellies in the shape of castles, and stuffed piglets. There are songs that can only be described as bawdy. More…
