Archive

American Politics

26 January 2012

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated,and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. More…

Reading, Writing, and Publishing

1 November 2011

Maybe it was just their generation. Because it seems like younger women don’t have that same problem. My mother just hates this book! She says: “Lightning Rods! Ah! I hate that book!” Then when it got a publisher, she said, “I’m going to try to read it again.” My loyal mother! And so then she got up to “tight, wet twat” and she just couldn’t go on. More…

Reading, Writing, and Publishing

28 October 2011

“I felt that Samurai was a very generous book in various ways, there were all these quotations. And with Lightning Rods, I wasn’t consciously trying to be ungenerous, but I had this sense from the beginning that it would be a very self-contained book, that it would not give anything away. It would be like The Producers. It would be funny.” More…

Art and Architecture

21 September 2011

Some artworks edify, some perplex, and some coerce, evacuating everyone who views them to a new and better reality. To watch the videos of Ryan Trecartin is to be led out of a cave of ignorance by a queer, 30-year-old Socrates. Burrowed in a couch at Any Ever, Trecartin’s “game-changing” summer exhibition at PS1, you become addicted to the Ryan-verse. More…

New York

14 February 2011

The symmetry is powerful, if accidental. Both factions are marked by recognizable hairstyles and unusual modes of dress. Both groups are resented by their near relations (ordinary bourgeois youth, mainstream Jews) for their economic dependence on others. Both groups live in configurations unusual for the advanced capitalist west. It would not be unusual to enter either a hipster or a Satmar apartment and see a cot in the kitchen. More…