Despite the tantalizing whiff of democracy they seem to exude, museums are not democratic institutions, and never have been.
Have you ever read a stranger narrate their divorce in real time?
Live Free or Die
More novels should invent macroeconomic concepts.
The Everything Snore

New Left Review
Who did neoliberalism?
The extent to which the iconic movements of the ’60s United States fed on existing liberalism and fed into neoliberalism is, however, all the more reason not to isolate the New Left as a singular cataclysm that destabilized the New Deal order. Far from a gently humming machine that could have kept operating indefinitely were it not for the intervention of a new generation of radicals, the United States’ simulacrum of social democracy was a fragile assemblage of competing intellectual tendencies and political coalition partners that was always threatening to fall apart.
I’m an asshole, he says. Don’t you love me?
Radical Narcissist

Shadow and Light
On Deborah Levy
There is something to the way Levy writes that makes one believe she could hear, see, read, or experience anything and say: OK. She offers many interpretations, but few judgments and even fewer conclusions. Her loyalties are total and her betrayals are final.
January 18, 2022

Seeing Through the Museum
On Dave McKenzie
Petty and glorious, revenge personalizes class war.
Once There Was Cinema
In the spirit of what he has called “unhinged generosity” toward the reader, Leyner wants to keep the gravy flowing.
Literary Miniaturist

Pictures at a Restoration
On Pete Souza’s Obama
Once safely out of office, he acknowledged that “millions of Americans” had been “spooked by a black man in the White House.” An undeniable truth, but one that was miles away from the embrocations he had offered the country when he launched his national career by declaring that “there is not a black America and a white America.” That kind of thing sounds like denialism to some, a postracial utopia to others, and then, in certain places, like a threat.
The New Deal order was simply too fragile for its winners to prioritize solidarity with less-protected workers.
The People, It Depends
After all, no one ever mentioned the putting of a human dick into a living mollusc.