Cultural Criticism and Analysis

Man Walking

How (Not) to Fake Your Own Death How (Not) to Fake Your Own Death

Elizabeth Greenwood’s "Playing Dead" is a brilliant series of entertaining character reports, but her telling of what all the deceit and deletions add up to is unconvincing.

Oct 20, 2016 / Hannah Gold

Protest in Poland

The Kids Are Alright: A Legendary Feminist on Feminism’s Future The Kids Are Alright: A Legendary Feminist on Feminism’s Future

Ann Snitow on freedom, Ferrante, feminism abroad, and why none of us can go it alone.

Oct 18, 2016 / Sarah Leonard and Ann Snitow

Jean Stafford

5 Novels About the Sordid Lives of High-Minded People 5 Novels About the Sordid Lives of High-Minded People

Zetigeist literature that prefigures the Brat Pack.

Oct 13, 2016 / 5 Books / Michelle Dean

Starr and Minaj

Pop Progress: From the Beatles to Nicki Minaj Pop Progress: From the Beatles to Nicki Minaj

Popular music still works as a place where young people can try out notions that challenge ideas dear to their parents.

Oct 3, 2016 / David Hajdu

Everything Is Interesting

Everything Is Interesting Everything Is Interesting

Nicholson Baker goes back to school.

Sep 29, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Evan Kindley

Deep Stories: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Journey into Trump Country

Deep Stories: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Journey into Trump Country Deep Stories: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Journey into Trump Country

For many of Louisiana Tea Partiers, "Democrat" wasn’t a bad word when they were growing up but it is now. The well-known sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild went to the heart...

Sep 28, 2016 / Books & the Arts / John B. Judis

How Journalism Can Mend Its Broken Relationship With Young People

How Journalism Can Mend Its Broken Relationship With Young People How Journalism Can Mend Its Broken Relationship With Young People

If it doesn’t, everybody loses.

Sep 20, 2016 / StudentNation / Will Anderson

The Get Down

Diamond-Dust Baroque Diamond-Dust Baroque

"The Get Down", Baz Luhrman’s fairy-tale remix of the birth of hip hop, offers a glimpse of the beginning of the end of US power.

Sep 15, 2016 / Pop & Circumstance / Joshua Clover

John Berger: The Human, the Artist

John Berger: The Human, the Artist John Berger: The Human, the Artist

In "The Seasons in Quincy", we learn little about the former and attempts to celebrate the latter collapse into the elegiac.

Sep 12, 2016 / Anakwa Dwamena

Antoine Volodine’s Army of Avatars

Antoine Volodine’s Army of Avatars Antoine Volodine’s Army of Avatars

Is there any other writer whose work is as strange and hermetic and gloriously, painfully appropriate to the unparalleled shittiness of our times?

Sep 7, 2016 / Books & the Arts / Ben Ehrenreich

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