What Some of Our Most Read Essays of 2016 Say About You
December 25, 2016
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IN RETROSPECT, 2016 WAS A PRETTY UNFORGETTABLE YEAR. While there are plenty of ways to parse the key subjects that claimed our collective mental space, we've compiled by theme the LARB interviews, essays, and reviews you most gravitated toward. This does not nearly cover all that we have published over the year, but we think it encompasses LARB's spirit — boundless, fearless, a little strange, uniquely literary, and very much “LA.”
What will 2017 bring? We're looking forward to forging brave new conversations with you in the year ahead.
ACADEMIA NOW (AND TOMORROW)
Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia
Dear Parents: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University But Don’t By Ron Srigley
Are PhD Students Irrational? By Aaron R. Hanlon
Death by Prefix? The Paradoxical Life of Modernist Studies By Gayle Rogers
The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the Age of Google By Kathleen Fitzpatrick
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
The Supermanagerial Reich By Ajay Singh Chaudhary, Raphaële Chappe
Why Conservatives Hate Fiscal Policy By Tom Streithorst
Two Bubbles of Unrealism: Learning From the Tragedy of Trump By Bruno Latour
Trump and the End Times By Dan Sinykin
Democracy — Too Much of a Good Thing? By Andrew Sullivan, Roslyn Fuller
WRITING NOW (AND TOMORROW)
Emojis, Comics, and the Novel of the Future By Tim Peters
What Happened to “Purity”?: Jonathan Franzen and the Aspirations and Disappointments of a Contract Writer By GD Dess
Michael Lewis and the Narrative Nonfiction Formula By Cody Delistraty
The Emerging Genre of Slut Lit By Joy Horowitz
WRITERS (AND WRITING)
The Limits of Absurdity By Robert Zaretsky
Kafka: An End or a Beginning? By Morten Høi Jensen
Was “Lolita” About Race?: Vladimir Nabokov on Race in the United States By Jennifer Wilson
A Brilliant Mind’s Pauses: The Fiction of Russia’s Greatest Poet By Bob Blaisdell
Third-Rail Erotica By Laura Frost
The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood By Lily Gurton-Wachter
An Incomplete Eloquence By Dustin Illingworth
THE NETWORKED WORLD
Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age By David Weinberger
Life as a Verb: Applying Buckminster Fuller to the 21st Century By W. Patrick McCray
Creepy Futures: Nicholas Carr’s History of the Future By Geoff Nunberg
LITERARY THEORY
Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Steve Paulson
Embarrassing Ourselves By Geoffrey Bennington
Žižek’s Trans/gender Trouble By Che Gossett
FILM/TELEVISION/MUSIC
What We’ve Got Here: “Arrival” By Jordan Brower
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life By Aaron Bady
Stranger Things, Season One By Aaron Bady
The Philosopher and Her Kisses By Stephanie DeGooyer
“He’ll try to keep his sanity / With the help of his robot friends” By Ian Williams
Tired of Waiting Around for the Trickle Down: The Politics of the Drive-By Truckers By Josh Schneiderman, Paul Fess
Is There God After Prince? By Peter Coviello
CONTEMPORARY MANNERS
Act Naturally: Pretentiousness, Coolness, and Culture By Barrett Swanson
Space Invaders By Oliver Wang
On Shit: Profanity as Weltanschauung By Mark Edmundson
CATS
The Case Against Cats By Colin Dickey
ASSORTED SUBJECTS
Evangelicals Are Losing the Battle for the Bible. And They’re Just Fine with That. By Jim Hinch
The Art of Administration: On Greg Barnhisel’s “Cold War Modernists” By Donal Harris
Nostalgia for World Culture: A New History of Esperanto By Ross Perlin
Thinking, Public and Private: Intellectuals in the Time of the Public By Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
A Very British Hatchet Job By Clement Knox
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