Section
Print/Screen
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Victorian Materialisms, Crip Realities
Raised-text print in the 19th century transformed literacy, reading practices, media representations of blindness, medical and journalistic discourse, and, most importantly, the everyday lives of blind people.
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The Spy Who Came In from the Carrel
In Nazi Europe, countless books were banned. So those who saved books—whether university archivists or Jewish scholars—became smugglers.
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What Was the Classroom?
As many COVID-era courses have moved from seminar rooms to Zoom meetings, the haptic nature of teaching has changed. Is anything lost?
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Stop Reading like a Critic
Think about your favorite book. Now ask yourself: Would you admit this to others? Most would share—but literature professors are not most people.
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Longing for the Writer’s Space
How should readers and scholars look on the tangible traces writers leave behind?
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All the World’s a Page
Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.
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Intellectual Alchemists
What distinguishes the American from the European intellectual? Does that matter?
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The House That Form Built
Across the slatted border between the United States and Mexico, near Ciudad Juárez, the artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello recently installed several …
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The Posthuman Enlightenment
What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these …
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Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen …
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Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how …
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How Does Copyright Matter?
Copyright as we know it is a surprisingly recent development. It has been with us just a few decades—only as long, roughly, as Hello Kitty and the Star Wars …
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“Everyone Writes Stories”
In the old days, people used to talk about gaming the system. It meant manipulating the rules to produce a desired outcome. The term was popularized by software …
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Newspapers and Northern Lights
In 1818 John Ross pointed the ship Isabella toward the Northwest Passage and opened up the Arctic exploration mania; the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of …
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Toward an Ecological Cinema
In France, a recent legislative bill identified the task of bringing about “corporate transformation” as one of the major challenges of the 21st century …
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From Slate to Silicon?
Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony …
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Physical Books, Digital Lives
“On or around December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously said, “human character changed.” If my memories of December 2010 serve, that’s when social media …
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The Book Is a Time Machine
When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious …
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Adoption Anxieties
Given the overall paucity of novels about interracial adoption, it is striking that no fewer than three were published in 2017. In general, reviewers warmly received Shanthi Sekaran’s Lucky Boy, Lisa …
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Reading with Strangers
On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications distributed at bus stops, markets, and municipal services offices.1 In 2007, I learned that 50,000 Chileans had submitted entries to the…
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Digital Lies, Real Ghosts
We’ve all obsessed over someone who isn’t there: fictional characters, an absent lover, the dead. The verb “obsess” means to haunt, harass, or torment, as an evil spirit. But we are usually the conjurors of our own ghosts. Andrew O’Hagan is different. The British journalist’s third work of nonfiction, The Secret Life, collects three previously…
