Category
Reprints
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The Great LOLCat Massacre
What makes cats so useful as an alphabet for the literature of the web?
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Free Is and Free Ain’t
Freedom has always been arbitrary in a world, then and now, when the practice of capitalism requires the ongoing erosion of even the most basic rights.
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Pornography Porn
The explosion of porn signals the widespread uptake of questions of objectification, the politics of looking, and the relation between power and enjoyment.
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Stop Defending the Humanities
Whatever things the humanities do well, it is beginning to look as if promoting themselves is not among them.
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The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
Rather than try to kill his literary parents, Eugenides embraces as many of them as possible.
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Does Chernobyl Still Matter?
Since it first announced electricity “too cheap to meter,” in the 1950s, the nuclear industry has promised bountiful futures powered by a peaceful—and safe—atom …
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Ted Chiang: Realist of a Larger Reality
What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific …
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Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos …
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Machines Like Me, but They Love You
In almost any book about artificial life, there comes a moment when the humans, like Victor Frankenstein, are obliged to confront the full reality of what they’ve …
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A Manifesto for the World as One Finds It
Animals have been disappearing for the past two centuries: first from our everyday lives, in the era of urbanization and industrialization, and then, as the sixth …
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Ben Lerner’s Intoxicating Honesty
Does fiction require anonymity? And if an author chooses to draw heavily from their own life, and the lives of those they know and love, how should a reader judge …
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Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the …
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Fairy Tales of Race and Nation
In its own allusive way, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread considers the imminent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. A textbook in …
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Power, Poison, Pain, and Joy
Sitting atop a police car beneath an oversized American flag, Kendrick Lamar opened the 2015 BET awards with his single “Alright.” “We hate the po-po …
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Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t recovered until 2003, when, along Shelling Hill Beach in County Louth, a man and his two children stumbled across her bones. This was…
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So the Earth Is Uninhabitable—Now What?
How do we talk about the urgency of climate change without making people …
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The Immigration Crisis Archive
Back in 1954, the Eisenhower administration shut down the US government’s last remaining long-term immigrant holding facility, an …
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A Black Counternarrative
Master narratives become the background music of our lives, undercurrents so ingrained that the violence they often engender is rendered unremarkable. One master narrative is the tale we tell about the United States being a welcoming country to immigrants, about how the “bootstrap” mentality enables one to build and sustain a life here. Another is…
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Is College Worth It?
What does it take to get to college graduation? The question becomes more urgent as college tuitions rise and education debt accumulates, even though baccalaureate completion remains a baseline credential for at least modestly secure employment. Our sprawling nation’s deep divisions in terms of class, race, and geography mean that people arrive at college with…
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A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with …
