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…
Throughout the 20th century, Parmar argues, the weak state was supplemented by private foundations, which took on many of the functions of government. Unelected, unaccountable, and for the most part unchecked, these foundations channeled billions of dollars into positioning the United States as a world power. Immune to the vicissitudes of democratic politics, they functioned as a shadow government. More…
Purpura takes the act of attention to extremes, staying and staying—with an object, a thought, a moment—in order to get closer to some place of deep stillness. She works her way through the fleeting impressions the world presses into her mind in order to arrive at new knowledge about what it means to have a mind capable of engaging in this activity at all. More…
To close-read the news reports was to be impressed by the suggestive quality of their syntax. As ABC phrased it, Eugene “had to be shot four times by a police officer to halt the cannibalistic attack.” That resignation—“had to be”—is a sort seldom used in reference to humans. It’s your sick pet that “had to be” put down, not your sick brother. 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…
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 Book of Mormon teaches us what secularists don’t get about what makes religion so awesome: it’s like a musical you live in, and it can actually be more fun if it seems a little fake, if you have to work a little to believe. There tend to be so many gaps that the thrill of it is filling them in, making them fit. More…
Like fast fashion, social media have brought with them a profusion of means and ways to reshape and display our identity. Constantly given new tools to share with, always prompted to say something new about ourselves (“What’s on your mind?” Facebook asks thoughtfully), we are pressured to continually devise ingenious solutions to our identity. More…
Reflected here was the first paradigm shift in the humanities since the emergence of theory and the culture wars of the preceding two decades. If the question of the ’80s and ’90s was, “What should we be reading, and how?,” the question that dogged the opening years of our new millennium was of a vastly more dismal kind: “Why bother?” More…
Video games are worth loving, but with this love comes shame. Not passing regret or social embarrassment, but a sharp-edged, physical guilt: the hunch-backed, raw-fingered, burning-eyed pain that comes at the sad and greasy end of an all-night binge. You have ostentatiously, really viciously wasted your life; you might as well have been masturbating for the last nine hours—your hands, at least, would feel better. More…
Mary Gaitskill’s characters do not give blowjobs. But one does bend down to a man’s waist “in a position that was not very pleasing either aesthetically or psychologically.” Her characters do not have random hook-ups. But a woman who’s had too much to drink may kiss a stranger with “an escalating slur of useless feeling.” Phrases like these force the reader to slow down in a way that the characters do not, revealing oral sex as a self-conscious pose, and a kiss as vivified desperation. More…
We’re very pleased to announce the imminent launch of N1FR, our new online film review. If you subscribe to our RSS feed, you may already have seen a preview of the issue. If not, you’ll have to wait until next week. More…
Critics have been worrying about the death of the novel for decades, and the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is unlikely to change that. The leading suspect in the novel’s murder has so often been mass culture—thief of time, sapper of seriousness—and here it is growing upon a literary classic like an aggressive tumor. More…
Revisiting the New York Times article after trying miracle fruit is another matter. To interpret Tabasco as donut glaze requires wishful thinking and recalls the party guest who’s wearing a lampshade after one beer. One suspects a preexisting need to make food more interesting than it is, more beautiful, more strange—an impulse more fundamental than a flavor-tripping party. More…
Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a friend, explained her reasons for writing A Room of One’s Own: “I wanted to do something for the young women—they seem to get fearfully depressed.” Jessica Valenti, the founder of Feministing.com, also wants to do something for the young women. More…
Reading Craigslist, I feel as though I am dipping my cup straight into the swift-flowing stream of human need. Laid-back is the only thing these people aren’t. When I step back onto the “regular” dating sites, I feel like someone coming out of bright sunshine into a darkened room; it takes a while for my eyes to readjust. Everything’s so . . . subtle. On Craigslist, people say what they want; on Nerve or OkCupid, they say who they are, and you infer the rest. More…
Those of us in commodity-rich, artistically saturated, more or less urbanized Western countries, at the start of the 21st century, know all too well how these games are played. We know it instinctively, so well that the kind of confession of musical taste offered above has become a drearily familiar part of everyday life. We also know it because we know “Bourdieu,” whether we’ve read the man or not. More…
In April 1975, North Vietnamese forces overwhelmed the South and took Saigon. American troops, who had mostly withdrawn by 1973, had no way of stemming the tide. “COMMUNISTS ENTER SAIGON,” ran the AP wire: “VICTORY IN INDOCHINA” was the banner that ran across the New Left Review’s May-June issue of that year. More…
A German friend asked me if graphic novels were erotic. I said, “No, they’re neurotic.” So neurotic they’re even appearing on English-department syllabi. But their graphic nature has been overlooked. Drawing is suddenly making a comeback in literature, where they know their Kafka and Classics Illustrated, but maybe not Daumier or Saul Steinberg. More…
Naomi Klein, almost unique among political journalists, has struggled to make our post-9/11 moment continuous with the late 1990s. She has looked for the neoliberalism inside of neoconservatism. The degree to which she has succeeded tells us something about whether the movement for greater economic justice—under whatever name—can expect to have a future. More…
It’s true that Roth hasn’t been funny lately. The humor largely went out of his work after Sabbath’s Theater, when he turned to writing historical tragedies. But never has the humor been so sorely needed. More…
The book ends with a promise of direct political relevance, in which the foregoing analysis will help us to intervene in and fix the world. How? Never by restoring the power of parliaments, or the rule of law. It’s too late for that. Rather, by finding a way to return to a “pure” politics—divorced from law, from power, from states—as Benjamin once fantasized a “pure” language and “pure” violence. More…
If a hall of fame were established for contemporary book reviewers, Christopher Hitchens would very likely be its second inductee. (James Wood, of course, would be the first.) About an amazing range of literary and political figures he has supplied the basic information, limned the relevant controversies, hazarded an original perception or two, and thrown out half a dozen fine phrases. More…
