Category
Reviews
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The Hypochondriac’s Complaint
“Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient’s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance.”
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Salsa For Salsa’s Sake
When will we finally listen to a song for what it is, rather than for what it should have been?
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The Once and Future Bathhouse
Utilitarian public baths and pools once filled the world’s cities, but now new expensive spas are taking their place. Has even bathing become a luxury?
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There Are More Prisons in Heaven & Earth…
“A political philosophy of the prison with no necessary relationship to the realities of the prison is a luxury we can ill afford.”
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Victor Frankenstein, ABD
What happens to a young scientist whose primary mentor is an artificial intelligence?
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Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny
What does it mean to abandon a sentient human that you have brought into the world? Del Toro doesn’t answer.
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Emily Brontë in Her Smut Era: The Romance Rebranding of “Wuthering Heights”
Repackaging Wuthering Heights as a Valentine’s Day date movie is a perverse distortion of a text where the only union is found in the dirt of a shared grave.
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Is the Cis Literary World Okay?
Contemporary trans literature is thriving in a highly freewheeling manner… How revealing, then, that David Brooks recently suggested that literary fiction has been declining in quality.
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Deracialized Discos: On “Discomania” and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict”
It’s common for teenage fantasy to find an engine in fiction. But teenage fantasy runs out.
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This Too Is Gaza
“In Gaza, life unfurls as a treasury of daily surprises that many Westerners miss in their hurry to get through their days,” says a Palestinian journalist. How we are treated, he insists, does not define who we are.
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Against Babel: Or, How to Talk to Strangers
Allegedly, some 45% of languages descend from one, ancient ”Proto-Indo-European“ tongue. But why focus on a hypothetical lost language, when we can work instead to hear one another today?
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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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Can Literary Fiction Save Classical Music?
Classical music’s most troubling traditions include erasing Black performers, abusing and harassing in conservatories, and refusing to acknowledge physical injuries.
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American Music, American War
In World War II, G.I.s waking up in a combat zone in Italy were reported to have belted out “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin,” a blockbuster smash of 1943.
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What Future for Native Sovereignty?
What does it mean to seek shelter on stolen land? asks Jon Hickey’s new novel, Big Chief.
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No End to the Spanish Civil War?
Latin America’s own conflicts over land, Church, labor, and democratization were played out, across the Atlantic, for all to see.
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“Totto-chan,” the Myth of Hans Asperger, and Disability Pride amidst Fascism
In the lead up to World War II, one headmaster educated children with a variety of abilities—and doing all he could to protect his students from Japan’s authoritarian government.
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Walking Lahore, Watching the World
The new mosque’s central dome dominates the town’s skyline, but competes with an 80-metre-high replica Eiffel Tower, and a scale reproduction of Trafalgar Square.
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Two Ways of Disliking Poetry
When I was fourteen, a friend invited me to stay a week with his family on the Outer Banks. What I remember most vividly about that week is a book.
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B-Sides: Rebecca West’s “The Fountain Overflows”
Do you find child narrators–their perceptiveness as well as their misprisions, their loyalties, their prejudices–endlessly absorbing?
