Wednesday, May 11 2011
How Sherlock Holmes and Isaac Asimov Can Help Purge Your Social Media Addiction
Old books and even older movies can fend off the creeping anxiety of information overload.
Friday, May 6 2011
Christopher Newfield’s ‘Unmaking the Public University’
What happens to America's higher education system when humanists meet industrial (and now post-industrial) knowledge managers and technocrats?
Monday, May 2 2011
88 Highly Debatable Statements About ‘Reality’ in ‘Reality Hunger’
When I review a book, I like to dog-ear pages that contain interesting passages or noteworthy statements. By the time I was done with Reality Hunger, my paperback was so puffed up by pages that were doubled in width from dog-earing that it looked like I'd dropped it into a hot bath filled with Calgon and then left it to dry on a radiator.
Thursday, April 28 2011
‘Atheist Manifesto’ Combines Density with Levity
This brisk study encompasses vast learning, marshaled with much wit, considerable venom and steady argument, all doled out in differing amounts.
Thursday, April 21 2011
‘Electric Eden’: A Musical Retelling of the Elusive Past
Rob Young, editor at The Wire music magazine, conjures up the contradictions of sound technology harnessed to rural moods, and an urban audience longing for antiquarian lore.
Wednesday, April 20 2011
How TV Ruined Charlie Brooker
Everything the media told us we now had to question, because Charlie Brooker showed us the truth. But hearts were broken when television's biggest critic was seduced by the boob tube's charm.
Monday, April 11 2011
‘The Brothers’ Lot’ Reaches Monty Python’s Heights of Nomenclature
Upon this ethical foundation for an entertaining tale, Kevin Holohan follows a satirical tradition which questions authority, undermines cliché, and upends the social order.
Friday, March 25 2011
Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love: The Films of Hal Hartley
Hal Hartley's films bridged the world of art school vibes and workplace routines, elite snottiness and pedestrian punches, suburban angst and critical thinking finesse, and mixed-up politics and prolonged personality crises.
Thursday, March 24 2011
‘Reading Jackie’: When Literary Choices Become Biography
Despite her love of books, Jackie Kennedy Onassis spent a lifetime trying to prevent people from writing about her, sometimes with the accompanying threat of legal action. Her entire life was led with one arm thrust outward, eyes cast downward, keeping the world at bay.
Tuesday, March 22 2011
When Did Trying to Be Good Start Feeling So Bad?
Now don’t get me wrong—of course I believe in saving the planet (at least until scientists determine if there are other inhabitable planets with better mobile phone service), but there's gotta be a limit.
Monday, March 21 2011
Banksy’s Bare Wit-ness
Like Aristophanes in Ancient Greece, Mark Twain in 19th century America, or Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, Banksy’s visual humor chastises power in its multiple manifestations by hauling it before the court of public opinion for a well-deserved flogging.
Friday, March 18 2011
Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways
When halal turkeys sell for Thanksgiving, "Happy Holidays" drowns out "Merry Christmas", Easter egg hunts replace Mass celebrating the Resurrection, and sacred Catholic terms in Quebec serve only as swear words, culture has parted ways with religion.
Tuesday, March 15 2011
‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ at 34: Still Thrilling After All These Years
What makes Close Encounters of the Third Kind stand out to this day is that it isn’t the usual UFO tale of “us vs them”, like Spielberg’s later remake of War of the Worlds; rather, it's very much a story about Earthlings.
Friday, March 11 2011
Strong and Soft Opinions: Tony Judt, Public and Private
Like J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet reveal the diverse cross-pollination of public and private speech. Ill Fares the Land ostensibly contains the strong opinions, The Memory Chalet the "soft" opinions.
Wednesday, March 2 2011
Marxism: The Music Theory That Never Goes Out of Style
How fitting that a post-punk band from the late '70s, fascinated by the Marxist metaphysics of modernity, would re-emerge to remind us that nothing new has happened in rock in decades. Of course Thom Yorke might disagree...
Wednesday, February 23 2011
In the Oft-Reviled Genre of Memoirs, Here are Some Memoirs to Love
A subgenre has emerged that should placate memoirphobes and please memoirfiles: the artist-teacher memoir.
The Librarians and Barbarians of Laura Bush’s Memoir
Laura Bush largely avoided the public slanderings that Nancy Reagan endured and that, to a lesser extent, Michelle Obama is now enduring, even though George W. Bush himself was perhaps the most excoriated President in recent American history. The reasons have something to do with Laura Bush's literary sensibility.
Friday, February 18 2011
Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City
The essays included in this fine, wide-ranging, thought-provoking volume take pains to remind the reader how every instance of urban dystopia – whether in Mexico, India, Africa or the United States – is shadowed by the particular history and legacy of its geography, culture, and society.
Thursday, February 17 2011
Across the Yucatán with a Ragtag Carny Crew
A Mexican dispatch, by the sea and on the road with students, musicians, actors, wild children, and juggling LSD dealers. On the backpacker trail from Cancún to Mérida, we discovered we were not the only ones on a global prowl.
Tuesday, February 15 2011
Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
While Disintegration contains its share of frank, bracing, straight talk that dispels long-held notions about black Americans, one of Eugene Robinson’s underlying assumptions — that America persists in seeing black people as an experiential monolith — is not the defining absolute it used to be.