a rage for rigor
TO THE HYPHENATED POETS Richer than mother’s milk is half-and-half Friends of two minds, redouble your craft. Our shelves our hives, our selves a royal jelly, may we at Benares and Boston, Philly and Delhi
Category: people
Rocking to sleep
actor and spectator
in the actor-spectator relationship, both participants experience self-knowledge by “trading places” with another person. for the actor, self-knowledge is gained by looking inward, as if into a mirror. the actor is trained to master her own mind and body so that she may produce the gestures and voice that convey another person. the better the [...]
why do marketers anthropomorphize cookies and candies?
perhaps, eating is inherently social – that is, we are hardwired to eat with others. how then to justify “indulging” oneself with food? perhaps, by believing, however remotely, that one is in the company of the very food we are consuming. What’s crackin! Wassup, bro!!!!! Hey pal, can I join you?
Bingo in Baghdad
From Daniel Voll’s The Hunter Becomes the Hunted in Esquire: Clemente arrived to interrogate the suspect, a handcuffed middle-aged man named Zaid, and underneath a napkin on the table, he found a small device, the size of a brick, with a hand crank and wires with alligator clips at the ends. Clemente shut down the [...]
Sons and daughters
The poignant, universal story of inter generational drift (class, immigration) obliquely rendered by Benjamin Dewey:
The religious impulse
Elif Batuman in the New Yorker: The findings at Göbleki Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a scared site that first obliged hunter-gatherers to organize themselves as a workforce, to spend long periods in one place, to secure a stable food supply, and eventually to invent [...]
The eyebrows of Björk circa 1988
The most beautiful eyebrows I have seen in some time – perhaps, because I do not live in Iceland.
From Plato’s Republic to The Firearms Philosophy of Ivan Chesnokov
Wherein I argue that the best way to learn, apart from painful personal experience, is via a story filled with colorful characters. Exhibit A: The Firearms Philosophy of Ivan Chesnokov I didn’t know I had any desire to learn about firearms until I stumbled on this collection of satirical forum posts penned in the style [...]
How North Koreans (and Cubans) read the state-sponsored newspaper
From the excellent blog Ask a Korean!, a very familiar account of how readers adjust to propaganda in order to eke out the truth: Take, for example, the war in Iraq. When the war broke out, North Korean newspapers would report: “Iraqi army is bravely battling against America’s imperial army, downing two fighter jets and [...]