Essays

Daily Survivor #1

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The work of being in pain every day is a form of manual labor in which the hours are unpredictable. The manual labor of being in pain every day is precarious because it is not a job you are paid to do, but a job that you pay to do, with your attention.

The Bourne Appraisal

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If James Bond is a sharply-dressed state-sponsored killing machine, Jason Bourne is his moral opposite — the machine gone haywire, resisting its programming.

The Self Unpoliced

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Is the self what we’ve lived through, what we’ve felt and thought? Is it what we have written? What part of the self browses the Internet? What is that self trying to get to?

Art & Algae: The Work of Anna Atkins

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As we face an accelerating environmental crisis in this century, Atkins’ seaweed impressions remind us about extinctions past and present, those erasures and absences yet to come.

Last Laugh

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Where is the glamor of the female masculine in the culture of the young? And why is Eileen Myles the only living female writer with macho swagger successful enough for straight people know about?

Deep Dream Believer

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Despite what you’ve heard, Google’s Deep Dream is not an artificial intelligence – it’s just an interesting image filter. What does this misrepresentation tell us about the state of online tech journalism?

I’m Not You

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The multiplicity of binaries and hierarchies in Leon Neyfakh’s THE NEXT NEXT LEVEL testifies to a profound uneasiness regarding the center of power in America, cultural and otherwise.

Unreal Loyalties in the Museum

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Old-guard museum loyalists have come to associate photography of artworks with inattention and disrespect. But that attitude is itself unfaithful to the possibilities of the museum.

False Moves

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Unselfconsciousness is covetable. We admire it in babies and seek to recover it as adults. But blackness is incompatible with unselfconsciousness. Blackness is a tracking device.