The Weak State: The Dissolution of Constitutional Iraq
Since the latest crisis in Iraq began, the twin evils of ceaseless sectarian retrenchment and unaccountable governance have been cast in stark relief. Three new books help us make sense of the past eleven years of Iraqi history.
I’m El Salvadoran to an Oaxacan, mulatto to a Haitian squinting her eyes, black to the negro curious about America’s slave past, and white to any Anglo too busy finding what they want to see there. Either I am nobody, or I am a nation.
Hatred of Publishing: A Conversation Between Industry Dropouts
We’re talking about an industry that literally cannot even achieve tokenism. Consumer pushes for diversity are an important and potentially useful action, but they’re no substitute for burning down the fucking house.
Like nostalgia, the translator’s dream is emotionally — even erotically — oriented towards the past, but the translator’s productivity is not located in memory. His problem is not the return home. How could it be? His provenance is a dead tongue.
This Is What a Feminist Looks Like, Maybe: On the Films of Mary Harron
How dare a woman contain multitudes, and contradictions, and not conform her entire lived experience to theory? How dare another woman, fifty years later, try to capture that on camera without offering some explicit feminist commentary?
The Great American Richards are primed to overcome all thoughts about fathers, all thoughts about mothers, all thoughts about wives and children, as though thought about anything is an affliction.
If beauty is truth and truth is beauty and something I find beautiful and truthful is hideous and deceitful for someone I respect, what can happen except bloodshed, a fight to the death?
Wes Anderson’s THE GRAND HOTEL ABYSS
The fulfillment we get from nostalgia can only be taken up, at best, in an ossified, brittle sort of way. Wes Anderson must understand this, as it is essentially what is dramatized in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Change in the Land: Willa Cather’s Midwest
The mysterious work of the novel in regard to climate change seems less about politics and more about calm, diverse reflection.
The lost innocence and deteriorating sanity of AMERICAN HUSTLE’s protagonists is meant to play less as tragedy than as camp.