Neighborhood Neighborhood
Our brick houses had one floor, storm windows to install in October, heavy brass doorknockers, screened-in patios, lawn jockeys, and front porches with wrought iron railings. The rusty bicycles flopped on the driveways, the smell of peat moss in wheelbarrows, the hum of fans from Sears Roebuck, sidewalks turning the color of grocery bags when wet. The luck of a clover with one appended leaf. We had board games like Monopoly shared by three families, the little green hotels disappearing just like the old market and the Bargain Center. The braided oaks with crooked tree houses, the burnt leaves, black fish swimming in air. And on an unseasonably sunny day in late October, I found my mother's floral umbrella and went strolling into the breeze under its spinning canopy, sucking a lemon.
Mar 20, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Judith Harris
The Strange Arcane: On George Saunders The Strange Arcane: On George Saunders
In the short stories of Tenth of December, the impression of chaos belies a careful design.
Mar 20, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Aaron Thier
The Quarrels of Others: On Anti-Semitism The Quarrels of Others: On Anti-Semitism
With Anti-Judaism, David Nirenberg has recast the debate about the origins and nature of anti-Semitism in Western thought.
Mar 20, 2013 / Books & the Arts / R.I. Moore
No Exit? Greece’s Ongoing Crisis No Exit? Greece’s Ongoing Crisis
How do Greece’s economists and writers explain its social predicament?
Mar 13, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Mark Mazower
Two Rights and A Wrong: On Taner Akçam Two Rights and A Wrong: On Taner Akçam
A historian’s view of why political demands, past and present, have weighed on Turkish debates about the Armenian genocide.
Mar 13, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Holly Case
At War With Art At War With Art
The Smithsonian’s show on the Civil War and American Art expresses a deep unease about the relationship between between art and history.
Feb 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / James W. Loewen
A Deliberate Pace: On Rachel Carson A Deliberate Pace: On Rachel Carson
On a Farther Shore captures the conservationist’s deep sense of geologic time and the forces of evolution.
Feb 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick
Wild Things: What Was Abstract Art? Wild Things: What Was Abstract Art?
MoMA’s monumental exhibition recalls the time when abstraction affected people like love or revolution.
Feb 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky
Hollywood Ending? Hollywood Ending?
Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects; Lynne Sach’s Your Day Is My Night
Feb 19, 2013 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
You Are What You Click: On Microtargeting You Are What You Click: On Microtargeting
Why privacy and anonymity are being violated online by an unstoppable process of data profiling.
Feb 13, 2013 / Books & the Arts / David Auerbach