Barbaric figs and ducks? There’s something exotic, even poetic, about the origins of the orgue de Barbarie. We might well expect to encounter amid those figs and ducks in the lush linguistic verdure of Marianne Moore’s famous “imaginary gardens with real…
Biaggi’s rise went hand-in-hand not just with law and order politics but with a shift in the balance of power within the police profession writ large—away from the respected chiefs, and toward the irascible rank and file and the unions that represented…
In a 250-word takedown sent to me over text, the brain trust of my father and Anthropic LLM Claude (which was, incidentally, trained not only on my father’s critical tendencies but also on my stolen work) described my first column as “name-droppy and…
Today, the poster is rarely, if ever, remembered for its relationship to the Cattle Baron, despite the name printed prominently in the bottom right corner.…
The prosecutorial strategy is a puerile one: completely overwhelm the jury with unrelated images of leftist protest—for ten full days!—and then hope for guilt by association.
Any intrigue is not over a win or loss, but tiny details: Can the opponent break Sinner’s serve? Reach a break point? Win more than two or three points against Sinner’s first serve?…
For my part, I knew that I had fallen in love with Dry Leaf when another cow—or was it a horse?—ambled through the frame enfolded in a pixelated outline distinct from the rest of the sky behind it.…
As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center.
The mere existence of a second Mary Bronstein movie, much less one as amazing as this, proves that patience and a bad attitude are not just their own rewards.…
The presumption that the world follows American athletes in particular at anything like the level that NBC coverage suggests is its own breed of bias.…
As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the weekend—is hardly a tendency idiosyncratically…
What we saw as shrines were remnants of a home, a bit of a lifetime or several lifetimes that still had some of the magic of the everyday in which the gods had for long happily existed.
If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overseas empire.
Even as the pace of work life quickened exponentially across the next two decades, email inboxes overflowing, media outlets proliferating and then contracting, websites and newsletters dominating and then collapsing, newspapers going online-only and then…
You may have noticed that this column feels a little incestuous (there is that Saskia Vogel again . . .) but that’s our world in translation. It’s small, and its actors, often by necessity, are prolific.…
What we’re doing now is this: The trainings have evolved into street medic workshops on protecting yourself from chemical weapons and lessons on digital security; there’s a meet-up to sew reinforced umbrellas as shields from mace and a collection spot for…
The ongoing uprising is rooted in the political economy of structural adjustment, which forms the unstable medium through which revolt becomes contagious.
Rarely considered together, the intertwined legacy of this odd couple, Skinner and Lilly, has given us the world we live in now: the world of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, of high-tech woo-woo and algorithmic self-optimization, a world that…