The Barbie Curse
Can a girl’s first icon of can-do power ever be good enough?
Barbie is the most popular doll in the world, and the most hated....
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Can American Liberalism Reinvent Itself?
How obscuring the public side of public-private partnerships from FDR to Clinton rendered the liberal state politically precarious
The DLC, soon to anoint Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas as their chairman and presidential standard-bearer, were leaving the legacy of New Deal and postwar liberalism behind. They were, after all, “New Democrats.”
Or were they?
...
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Don’t Read the Wall Text
A first-time visitor confronts the jargon of International Art English at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale
A first-time visitor confronts the jargon of International Art English in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale wall text...
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Eau du Easy Mark
An excerpt from Lucky Dogs: A Novel
My natural scent could be called “eau du easy mark,” an odor only vermin can detect, a spicy mélange of paralysis perfume with prior-history-of-abuse essence....
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The Pro-Nazi Artist Behind the Brooklyn Public Library’s Facade
German-American sculptor Carl Paul Jennewein, who designed the library’s iconic entrance reliefs, participated in Nazi exhibitions and espoused white supremacist beliefs
Brooklyn Public Library’s entrance artwork propagates a colonialist, white supremacist vision that is inseparable from Nazism....
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A World in Motion
A review of Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere
Bhanoo evokes not the spectacular scenes of people in motion that fill the news, but the ordinary and everyday events that make up lives in migration, and how the lives of Indian and Indian American women have changed over the years....
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Nihilism for the Whole Family!
How Evelyn misinterpreted Waymond’s rebellion in Everything Everywhere All At Once
Evelyn’s response to the multiverse reflects an existentialist resolution that builds upon a particular version of nihilism: if the universe is inherently meaningless, then we are at liberty to create our own meanings within it....
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Year of the Rat
An excerpt from Marc Anthony Richardson’s experimental novel
... it had a semi-prehensile tail that nearly snaked a forearm like an opossum’s or a cat’s, but it was a gargantuan rat’s ......
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Entertaining Propaganda: Hate-watching Fauda
The elision of the difference between Jews and Israel is one of the tragedies of the Middle East conflict
In Fauda, the Palestinians are often driven more by personal pathology than an outrage at historic injustice....
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Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes
An excerpt of Interior Frontiers
This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...
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Bard, Kinetic
An excerpt from the preface of Anne Waldman’s new nonfiction book
Poetry has always braved shifting and terrifying frequencies. There is no time in human history without poetry. Poets often go into exile in fraught times....
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The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness
Is it possible to decode the mystery of the world’s most haunting children’s book?
What The Morgan gets right is showing us how The Little Prince took shape from day one...
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