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Ask Not What Your Robot Can Do for You, but What You Can Do for Your Robot
Jerrine Tan visits a LOVOT robotics lab and is unexpectedly enchanted.
All Essays
Addressing the China Challenge: Realisms Right and Wrong
What does the future hold for US–China relations, and what does it mean to be realistic about that future?
Ostalgie: Revisiting East Germany
Does nostalgia for the old East Berlin come from a deeper longing for socialism?
Carnivalesque: On the Ways We See Basketball
In a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 39: “Air,” Tosten Burks surveys the new philosophy and syntax of basketball writing.
Work and the New Wave: On My Capricious Summer with Jiří Menzel
Emily Tamkin documents her Jiří Menzel binge and explains how and why his films hold up so well today.
Stories We Tell: The Promise and Peril of Mental Illness Narratives
Through analysis of Meg Kissinger’s “While You Were Out: An Intimate Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence” and Rachel Aviv’s “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and Stories that Make Us,” Isabel Ruehl contemplates the role of storytelling in perpertuating mental illness.
The Funny Thing About Misogyny
In a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 39: “Air,” Katie Kadue breaks down the misogynist history of the rape joke.
Men Explain Periods to Me
Farah Ahamed on how men reacted to her book about menstruation—by explaining menstruation.
Endgame Emotions: The Melting of Time, the Mourning of the World
Mikkel Krause Frantzen explores emotions at the end.
The IIC School Versus the JLF School of Indian English
Sumana Roy on how the vernacularization of the English language has affected Indian political and cultural life.
When the Dust Won’t Settle: Stories of Syrian War and Earthquake Survivors
Elle Kurancid writes about the aftermath of the earthquake in Syria, with documentary photographs by Walaa Alshaer.
A Fireball in the Marshall Islands: How a Nuclear Test Changed the World
Émile P. Torres describes how it was not the dropping of the atom bombs in 1945 but the testing of a nuclear bomb is the Marshall Islands in 1954 that marked the moment when people became preoccupied with human extinction.
What Drove Popeye to the Picket Line: The Story of “Fleischer’s Animated News”
“Fleischer’s Animated News,” an animation industry comic from the 1930s, satirized working conditions similar to those motivating the Hollywood strikes today, as Paul Morton discusses.
School Spirit: Debts and Gifts from Wallace and Lethem
Colin Flynn remembers learning from David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem.
Zeal, Wit, and Fury: The Queer Black Modernism of Claude McKay
Gary Edward Holcomb considers the suppressed legacy of Claude McKay’s two “lost” novels, “Amiable with Big Teeth” and “Romance in Marseille.”
You Can Always Get What You Want: On “The Big Chill” and American Politics
Henry M. J. Tonks explains how Lawrence Kasdan’s “The Big Chill” gets generational politics all wrong—and why we still need to watch it.
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