Archive

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  My Disappointment Critic

  I hadn’t realized until Wood was off my pedestal that I’d built one. That I’d sunk stock in the myth of a great critic.

  Jonathan LethemNov 7, 2011

• Letters to the Editors

  The real human problem is not the need to remember everything: it is the necessity of deciding what it is important to remember.

  Nov 6, 2011

• The Age of Revolution: Eric Hobsbawm’s “How to Change the World”

  For Marx, Hobsbawm emphasizes, capitalism was not just exploitation and oppression. What made capitalism unique was its dynamism.

  Nov 4, 2011
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  Around the Table

  These unanticipated truffles hiding deep in the gratin dauphinois of Gopnik's larger story remind us that food permeates every facet of our lives.

  Thane TierneyNov 3, 2011

  • Cultural Studies

  • Food & Drink

• The Natural

  Cage, so long associated with the New York avant-garde, now strikes me as quintessentially Californian, and more specifically, Angeleno.

  Nov 2, 2011

• Words, Words, Words: On Glenn Ligon

  Beyond Ligon’s instinct for the telling quote, it is the sumptuously lush surfaces of his paintings that beguiles the eye.

  Nov 1, 2011

• Postmodern Prometheus

  A scientist named Dr. Victor discovers the secret to life itself and, hoping to bear a race “better and nobler” than humanity, creates a giant man through nefarious processes.

  Oct 31, 2011
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  Let Us Compare Terrologies

  The pre-Comics Code era was so lawless and raw it was apparently Ageless.

  Joe McCullochOct 31, 2011

• The Horror

  I’d found my thing. I embraced the scary. I befriended it. The monsters and I fell in love, and I didn’t question why. I was home.

  Oct 30, 2011

• Paperback Writers: Joan Didion

  Didion is so afraid of her own depths of feeling she can’t avoid revealing them. That’s her contradiction, her fascination.

  Oct 29, 2011

• Having, or Making, or Thinking About Making a Drink

  Reading Didion’s prose has always been an aural experience as much as a literary one, as much about rhythm and intonation.

  Meghan DaumOct 28, 2011

• Kind of Blue

  So raw on the page that it infuses you.

  Amy EphronOct 27, 2011

• Where the Morning Went

  This is autobiography at its most fragmented.

  Oct 26, 2011

• The Baby

  Didion circles the images of her past like a wary woman who has found a basket lodged in the reeds that contains a sleeping infant.

  Oct 25, 2011

• Positions of Privilege

  Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer.

  Oct 24, 2011
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  Unmentionables

  The theme of male friendship is virgin territory for Rush, but the basic framework of the protagonist-couple and their idioverse is a Rushian staple.

  Magdalena EdwardsOct 23, 2011