An annotated table of contents for Issue 13, featuring Astra Taylor on education outside the school system, Russian poet and activist Kirill Medvedev on the fate of progressive literary culture, an excerpt from Benjamin Kunkel’s new play, a report from Franco Moretti’s literary lab, a collective portrait of the Occupy movement and argument for a left populism, and much more. More…
In New York, word was that Brooklyn and Queens were over. The next neighborhood was Wall Street. Friends, acquaintances, and people I’d only read about online were all relocating to a nice park with nice sleeping bags and tents, but they never had time for me, they never wanted to go to the movies or grab a drink, they were Occupied. The cops showed restraint. The cops showed no restraint. More…
I believe that when your Officer Cho was leaning on my chest last night with a plastic police shield, to clear room for pedestrians who didn’t exist, pushing hard with a line of his coworkers on a crowd of us, he said to me, from behind his plastic visor, where he could watch us all as if on television, or in his car, so he didn’t have to think, this phrase: “It’s a game.” More…
We asked our editors what they’ve been reading lately, and almost all of us have been reading for Occupy Wall Street. We recommend Corey Robin’s Reactionary Mind, the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. We also suggest skipping your graduate school qualifying exams and traveling light. More…
Tucked beneath our covers, laptops propped on our knees—is this not the posture most conducive to meaningful Gchatting? In addition to being comfortable, our beds are private; on Gchat, we must be by ourselves to best be with others. Night affords another degree of solitude: like the lights in the apartment building across the street, Gchat’s bright bulbs go out, one by one, until a single circle glows hopefully. Like Gatsby’s green light, it is the promise of happiness. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 12, featuring an excerpt from Helen DeWitt’s new novel, reporting from the Gathering of the Juggalos, an essay on Stanley Cavell as a philosopher and teacher, an argument against humanitarian intervention, the definitive history of Pitchfork, the beginning of a deep history of recent American fiction, a survey of chat through the ages, and much more. More…
“Žižek nicely termed the argument over the Kosovo intervention a ‘double blackmail.’” “Google+’s stated purpose is to make ‘sharing on the web more like sharing in real life,’ which is true only if ‘in real life’ is understood to mean ‘on the rest of the internet.’” ”Erlewine’s error can be found in the assumption that what people wanted was an encyclopedic survey of music itself.” More…
“Luc Boltanski’s On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, published in French in 2009, has just come out in translation from Polity, and I’m really learning from it.” “Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette is a creepy exciting little French book.” Our summer reading recommendations keep coming, with more thrillers, biographies, and Kathleen Hanna. More…
“I’ve been reading Houellebecq’s new novel The Map and the Territory. As of about halfway through, I can report no sex.” “I’d like to propose that all American teenagers give their copies of Please Kill Me and Letters to a Young Poet a rest and instead read Alice Echols’s impressive history of American radical feminism.” Editors and contributors share their favorite memoirs, novels, and philosophical treatises for the summer. More…
The fact-filled internet has only heightened the pre-Google asymmetry between those, on one side, loyal to Baconian methods of patient, inductive gathering of facts and those, on the other side, who didn’t need to read Foucault or the Frankfurt School to nurture a suspicion that positivist orders of knowledge mask a hierarchy of power in which they are meant to occupy the lowest rungs. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 11, including (very) short excerpts from “The Information Essay,” reports from Egypt and Wisconsin, new fiction by Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and essays on a brother in Afghanistan, obscure English poetry in Cambridge, crisis in the humanities, and Yelp. There’s more where that came from; subscribe today! More…
Has any concept more completely defined and disfigured public life over the last generation than so-called elitism? Ever since Richard Nixon’s speechwriters pitted a silent majority (later sometimes “the real America”) against the nattering nabobs of negativism (later “tenured radicals,” the “cultural elite,” and so on), American political, aesthetic, and intellectual experience can only be glimpsed through a thickening fog of culture war. More…
An annotated table of contents for Issue 10, including (very) short excerpts from an analysis of MFA and NYC literary cultures, an essay connecting the pro-life and animal rights movements as “the two cultures of life,” a report on an Indian millionaire and his money, excellent, possibly X-rated fiction from Sheila Heti, and four responses to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. There’s more where that came from; subscribe today! More…
Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write its history without contempt or nostalgia? Why are we tempted to declare the neo-hipster moment over, when the hipster’s “global brand” has just reached apotheosis? A panel of writers invited the public to join an investigation into the rise and fall of the contemporary hipster. Their debate took place at the New School University in New York City, and was followed by articles, responses, and essays, all printed for the first time in this book. More…
Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in Gmail’s sometimes tactless data mining of your emails: write a friend that your cat has died and you learn, cruelly, of discounts on litter. More…
Web 2.0 has been revelatory in lots of ways—user-generated naked photos, for one—but the torrent of writing from ordinary folks has certainly been one of the most transfixing. Over the past five years the great American public has blogged and Tweeted and commented up a storm and fulfilled a great modernist dream: the inclusion, the reproduction, the self-representation of the masses. More…
From the standpoint of Kant’s “purposiveness without a purpose,” the answer to the question Are video games art? appears to be an emphatic no. Kant’s was a theory of spectatorship, not participation. An art object allows our minds to play freely over it, not with it. More…
“It’s not a revolution if no one loses,” leading webist Clay Shirky has written. The first ones the internet revolution came for were the travel agents, those nice people who looked up flight times and prices for you on a computer, before you could do it yourself at home. Then Captain Kirk returned from the future to zap them all. More…
In n+1, we never wanted to run book reviews. Our purpose was to print the long arguments—unexpected flashes—wild visions that mattered to us, but that no one else would publish, naked as they came. “You need a peg to hang that on. How about a new book on Daniel Bell?” A generation hid its real ideas in book reviews, the way previous generations, wary of the Inquisition, hid theirs in arcane tracts. More…
In the early days of the inbox, it afforded the naive human organism a certain pleasure to receive an email. Ah, someone thinking of me . . . So a note or two of companionship whistled through the lonely day. Thanks to email, the residual eloquence of a moribund letter-writing culture received a rejuvenating jolt of immediacy. More…
Western civilization spent 2,500 years trying to get people to shut up. The armies of Alexander the Great were amazed to see their leader read a letter from his mother silently—because he alone knew how. After the dawn of Christianity, centuries upon centuries admired the ability not to vocalize, not to talk. Silence was an achievement. More…
The work machine is also a porn machine; the porn machine is also a work machine. Work enters everything. And therefore porn becomes, in its way, a revenge. In the midst of a productivity boost of the sort that comes along once in a century, workers are indulging, in record numbers, in the least productive human activity of all. More…
Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. More…
A reading is like a bedside visit. The audience extends a giant moist hand and strokes the poor reader’s hair. Up at the podium is someone who means to believe in his or her work, and instead he’s betrayed by his twitchy body and nervous laughter. The writer looks like his mother dresses him, he has razor burn on his neck, his hands may be shaking. More…
How absurd was the effort of Robbe-Grillet to make writing into a kind of film! How silly of Tom Wolfe to think the novel should compete with journalism on the one ground—information-gathering—where it can’t! Someone should tell the novel that it is not dying; those death throes were just the shortness of breath that comes with loss of market share. More…
Cher Ami, I am depressed. Things are worse here than I thought. It’s a mess and what’s more it’s a provincial mess. But let me go back. A brief history of 20th-century French fiction. More…
The novel didn’t make any promises. Quite the opposite: it could have scared you off of life. But somehow its congenital unhappiness actually made you want to live. More…
Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. More…
Perhaps it’s like this: You can go through the defense of taste and come out the other side, as if you jumped out the kitchen window into the alley dumpster. There is a kind of fake refinement that turns into a vulgarity baser than any other. It doesn’t come from saying the worst, it comes from deciding what other people can’t say. More…
The first regression was ethical. Eggersards returned to the claims of childhood. Transcendence would not figure in their thought. Intellect did not interest them, but kids did. Childhood is still their leitmotif. The second regression was technical and stylistic. In typography and tone the Eggersards adopted old innovations, consciously obsolete maneuvers. More…
