Tag
Class
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Price-Tag TV and the Transformation of Television Prestige
Apple’s “Price-Tag TV,” to propose a new entrant to the TV name game, is expensive programming about folks who like expensive things, made for viewers who either can’t see or don’t care about the difference between good and expensive.
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Close to the Bone: An Interview with Filmmaker Debra Granik
Debra Granik is the director and co-writer of Winter’s Bone, which was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her latest film, the documentary Stray Dog, follows the everyday life of a Vietnam veteran. A. O. Scott called it an “implicit challenge to the lazy habit of looking at American life…
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Back to Work
A job, in itself, is pure potential. I sometimes spend hours scrolling through job listings and Craigslist ads imagining different possible lives, each one viable. This is the type of fantasy that the main character of Helen Phillips’s recent novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, engages in. In a job taken out of necessity, Josephine Newbury processes…
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To Be “A Glorious Thing Made Up of Star Dust”: A Suicide Note from the University of Hyderabad
In India, like elsewhere, the university is a place of upward mobility. It is also the tense meeting ground of social difference; of young people across caste, gender, religious, and sexual identities who encounter each other in the space of the classroom, where the divide between urban and rural, between English and the regional languages,…
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Welcome, Now Keep Out
At first blush, the title of T. Geronimo Johnson’s second novel, Welcome to Braggsville, tempts us with the suggestion of hospitality. Might we be invited into this charming fictional Georgia town, population 712? There we meet D’aron Davenport, a present-day high school senior who has won a scholarship to attend the University of California, Berkeley.…
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Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by Dalkey Archive Press. • Joe Cleary on Choi In-hun, The Square • Wai Chee Dimock on Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize •…
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Streetwise in Weimar
Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close by one of the greatest political catastrophes in human history. Framed by this intimate conjunction of triumph and tragedy, the analysis of…
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How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the restaurant—with a menu that includes frog legs and a bottle of Bordeaux that sells for $2,000—is an incongruous new addition to an area of Brooklyn where…
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Prajwal Parajuly and the Responsibilities of Fiction
“The Chaurasi is a curious event,” writes Prajwal Parajuly in the author’s note to his new novel, Land Where I Flee, “not many Nepali-speaking Hindus in India, especially people of my generation, know much about it.” In this teasing sentence, Parajuly, who has been hailed by the BBC as “The next big thing in South Asian…
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Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. I lunched with the Vice President for Global Centers three days ago and told him, only half in…
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Crossing the Line in Baltimore
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Greenmount Avenue is a historic Baltimore street running downtown to the Inner Harbor and north to York, PA. There’s a famous cemetery and several renowned churches with congregations and choirs from across the city. The northern section between…
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Studying Up
In an often-quoted manifesto, Laura Nader urged fellow anthropologists (and, by extension, sociologists and other social scientists) to “study up,” do their research among the rich and powerful people directly responsible for the ills of society, rather than among the poor, who can’t as easily protect themselves from intrusive social scientists who want to pry…
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Everyday India
Nikhil Suroshe is the child of small farmers in Yavatmal district, Maharashtra. He is fair-skinned, with a mop of brown hair and a regal nose, and in India, where skin is often read as an indicator of caste background and class privilege, it is the first thing you notice about him. He is a handsome…
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Kids in Cages
In June 2011, the State of California permanently shut down the Preston Youth Correctional Facility, a reform school for orphans and juvenile offenders that had been in operation for over a century. Since its inception in 1894, the school saw the rise and fall of variously strict, benevolent, neglectful, and sadistic regimes, all engaged in…
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Mexico City Chronicles
According to the latest version of the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, a crónica is both “a history that obeys the order of the times” and “a journalistic piece … about current events.” But it is more. Starting in the 19th century, crónica and urban life became inseparable; to the mere…
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Are Diamonds Conflict Gifts?
When De Beers launched the ad campaign “A Diamond Is Forever” during the post-WWII jubilance, they faced a generic difficulty associated with gift giving, which is that “among refined and sensitive people presents that are meant to pay tribute to a person must make the money value imperceptible.”1 A gift should be valuable but make…
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The Teflon Kid: How Annie Enables Apathy About Inequality
What’s not to like about seeing an adorable black child nestled up with a baby animal on the cover of the New York Times Style Magazine? The composition of this shot links child actor Quvenzhané …
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The Piketty Effect: Part 1
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to instant best-seller status and wide acclaim and debate. In the United States, his author appearances drew enormous audiences…
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Street Corner Society
The world thinks it knows Manhattan. A thousand movie portrayals, among them Woody Allen’s classic Manhattan, and TV shows like Sex and the City have imprinted its iconic skyscrapers on our imaginations. Looking at Richard Howe’s extraordinary photographic portrait of the island, New York in Plain Sight, reveals that this assumed familiarity is a sign…
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Saints on the Dollar
What would happen if you asked Gertrude Stein about the difference between culture and capital? Well, of course, dollar bills would fall from the heavens like flurries, all below would fan snow angels in the leaves of green, and eventually T. I.’s rap song “Bring Em Out” would blast in the background as if from…
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Geoff Dyer’s American Liberation
Geoff Dyer may be the greatest complainer in contemporary literature. It’s a quality of Dyer’s writing that is often noticed but rarely celebrated, the snobbish and insecure voice on the page that’s infectious even when annoying and runs through all his best work. In a way Dyer’s writing exists in its own genre—a genre of…
