Prison Writings in a World Come of Age
by Martin E. Marty
Only a zealous and informed scavenger could have found and assembled scribbled fragments which eventually became the published prison letters by the best-remembered German cleric who gave his life in the anti-Nazi cause. There was no manuscript of the book which later appeared in many languages around the world. The gallows took its author, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before he had a chance to shape a book…
Technology: Game Changer or Game Stopper in the Middle East?
by Dan Caldwell
Despite the Ayatollah’s desire to reverse history and take Iran back to the mores of the fifteenth century, he readily exploited a late twentieth-century technology to communicate and spread his message: cassette tapes. Smuggled into Iran, duplicated, and sold in bazaars, cassette tapes (low-tech compared to today’s standards) contributed to the overthrow of the Peacock throne…
- Contradictions of Monopoly Capital
- In early 1970s Glasgow, symbolism and existentialism were meat and drink in the pubs around the university…
- What to do when a student hands in crap?
- Flat-Packs and Prose
- Michael Sandel Talks Justice
- ‘Charmed sentences follow one another like dance steps along the winding road itself’
- Action Scene
- Thomas Pynchon, (Relative) Feminist by Joanna Freer
- Planning Beijing
- “A new age wants new imaginations”
Bookshelf:
Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema
Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich
Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street
by Herman Melville
I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of…
Older
- ‘Liberal secularism is on its way to becoming the new group-think’
- Needy
- T Racer
- S. Jonathan Wiesen: Decaffeinated Nazis
- “Everyone knows you play ball or live with the consequences”
- Part of the Labyrinth
- Ship Out
- ‘The Facebook rebellion seems curiously faceless’
- 1945, 1956, 1968, 1979-1980, 1989-1991, 2001-2003, 2008-2010
- When Drones Strike
- ‘The New York hustler was both homosexual object-choice and heterosexual subject par excellence’
- A Rainforest Barcoded
- “NO IDEA”
- The Islands Can Be Filmed
-
If some books are good because they don’t sell, others are just as likely to be judged good because they do…
Readers of the Pack: American Best-Selling | by Ruth Franklin,
Bookforum
In Making The List, his 2001 book about best sellers, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda recalls that the publishing house once commissioned a study of which books made the most money. After a detailed presentation, the consultant said to the editors, “Do you guys realize how much money the company would make if you only published best sellers?”
- ‘This is where you are’
- Judie Newman: Bellow & Trotsky
- Yo Decido
- 212-628-0400
- ‘After negotiating a maze of passageways Berners-Lee delivers me at the door of Noam Chomsky’
- Why faux-vintage now?
- Miniaturists
- “I heard the runners got a little restless”
- Immortality!
- The Ultimate Rose
- Fabulous at Lying
- ‘Filtering algorithms are editorial in nature’
- Freewheelin’
- John Kenneth Galbraith was a satirist of economics almost as much as a practitioner of it…
- Les Bisous
- Back to the Arcades
-
There will inevitably come a point when photorealism in videogames reaches its zenith. But what happens after that point is achieved?
Visual Games: Photorealism in Crisis | by Kyle Chayka,
Kill Screen
In certain corners of the world of Super Mario 64, there are graphical glitches that turn a seemingly solid space into a splintered chaos of polygons…
- “Machines — should work — people — should think”
- Keep the Red Textbook Flying
- Octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings
- Champions of the Rich
- Why Elif Batuman doesn’t read reviews
- Interned
- Does lack of income take away the brain’s horses?
- Under the Volcano
- ‘In science, you have to search under the lamp post, or you’ll never find anything’
- Has Turkey really gone east?
- Téa Obreht’s Well-Told Tiger Tale
- Mirth
- Detroit Red
- ‘The world I longed for was the world of the X-Men’
-
Interest in Psychedelics ‘Schrooms
Researchers Re-Open Their Minds to Psychedelic Drugs | by Sam Kornell
Miller McCune
Mike told me doesn’t do mushrooms very often-maybe once or twice a year-but when he does, it’s because he wants to explore a problem in his life that has been troubling him. “When I take them, it may be because I have a decision to make, or maybe I suspect that my outlook toward something is not as healthy or as loving as I would like it to be,” he said…
- Contractors’ War
- Z-Man
- ‘Spring high water often knocks the sign away’
Older Goodies
- Podcast: John Mikhail on Universal Moral Grammar
- Short story: ‘The Pilot’ by Anna North
- Slideshow: Chernobyl Zone
- Book excerpt: ‘Dark Desires And The Others’ by Luisa Valenzuela
- Poem: ‘Uniforms’ by Barbara Schmitz
- Video: The Weird, Wonderful World of Bioluminescence
- Image galley: 3:10 to Lublin
- Short story: ‘Home’ by George Saunders
- Podcast: Concepts of Scarcity
- Slideshow: The Dreamkeepers
- Video game: Sky Island
- Book excerpt: ‘The Kangaroo Girl’ by Judith Baumel
- Image galley: Here We Come, Through the Trees
- Slideshow: Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs
- Poetry podcast: Lisa Russ Spar reads ‘The Irises’
- Short story: ‘The Suicide Room’ by Adam Ross
- Video: Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand (1959)
- Podcast: Blake Butler reads from ‘There Is No Year’
- Book excerpt: ‘Bomboozled’ by Susan Roy
- Poem: ‘Madrigal’ by Dean Young
- Image gallery: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
- Slideshow: Cathedrals of Desire
- Graphic novel excerpt: ‘Gonzo’ by Will Bingley and Anthony Hope-Smith
- Poem: ‘Peace Lilies’ by Cathy Smith Bowers
- Short story: ‘The Cure’ by Rahul Mehta
- Video: Shirin Neshat: Art in Exile
- Photo essay: Blood and Gold
- Slideshow: An Ecological Ambassador
- Book excerpt: ‘The Great Sperm Whale’ by Richard Ellis
- Comic strip: The Dawn of Neurosis
- Poetry podcast: John W. Evans reads ‘Sandwich Notch Road, Two Days Before Christmas’
- Short story: ‘M&M World’ by Kate Walbert
- Poem: ‘The Grotto’ by Fanny Howe
- Image gallery: Caught in the Grip of the City of Madness
- Slideshow: Life Under Communism
- Podcast: David Eagleman on Morality and the Brain
- Book excerpt: ‘Embassytown’ by China Miéville
- Poem: ‘Police Chalk Outline…’ by Dennis Trudell
- Video: George Soros: Chinese Hostility to the Open Society
- Image gallery: Space Teriyaki 2