• print • Summer 2018

    Another Country

    Country fans no longer resemble the characters in country songs; they are salaried accountants chewing Nicorette in Chevy Tahoes, not railroad linemen spitting Copenhagen through the shot-out windows of a Ford F-150. Their assimilation worries them, and they sometimes overcompensate. “If any of you tuned in to ABC tonight expecting to see the new show Black-ish,” said host Brad Paisley at the 2014 Country Music Association Awards, referring to the sitcom about assimilation anxiety in the suburbs, “this ain’t it. In the meantime, I hope y’all are enjoying white-ish.” The joke had another meaning,

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  • print • Summer 2018

    Gathering Evidence

    Louis XIV would seem to offer a natural opening for an exegesis of seventeenth-century French culture—during the longest reign in European history, the Sun King presided over both the political ascendance and the artistic efflorescence of his nation. For all the regent’s preeminence, however, the royal rectum seems a less obvious point of entry. Yet that is exactly where Edward Eigen locates his readers when he affirms, with a precision as striking historically as it is startling anatomically, that on “January 15, 1686, Louis complained of a small tumor toward the perineum, at the apex of the

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  • print • Summer 2018

    Zoe Leonard: Survey

    IN THE LATE 1980S, at the outset of her celebrated career, Zoe Leonard had a crisis of conscience. aids was massacring entire communities with alarming speed, and as a vital member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (act up), she found herself distrusting the value of art in an era when activism felt far more urgent. She showed her friend David Wojnarowicz some pictures of clouds she’d taken that she worried were slight, their politics too nuanced, but he reminded her that beauty was in part what they were fighting for. “You want to help create a world where you can sit around and think

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  • print • Summer 2018

    Night and the City

    The tabloid photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, produced many iconic New York City images, but one in particular, taken in December 1940 in the East Village, captures the quintessence of his life and career. The photo presents a slain gangster, one Lewis Sandano, facedown on the pavement, partially covered by what appears to be a crumpled and bloodied sheet of butcher paper; a policeman stands beside the corpse and takes notes with businesslike aplomb. But this otherwise ordinary crime-scene image offers a wry comedic twist—dominating the foreground of the frame, hovering over

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  • review • April 30, 2018

    The Pisces by Melissa Broder

    Melissa Broder’s 2016 book of contemplative essays, So Sad Today, revolves around her chronic depression and the anxieties and illnesses that attend it. Exhilaratingly, she is willing to truly let it all hang out, charges of “narcissism” be damned. In one passage from the book, she discusses the “ocean of sadness” she was trying to block through therapy, antidepressants, and sundry other remedies. “I always imagined that something was supposed to rescue me from the ocean,” Broder writes. “But maybe the ocean is its own ultimate rescue—a reprieve from the linear mind and into the world of

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  • review • April 17, 2018

    The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America by Anders Walker

    In 1977, the school district of Kansas City, Missouri, sued the state of Missouri for supporting segregation. Kansas City students were largely black; suburban schools educated significantly whiter populations. The government’s districting policies, the suit alleged, produced de facto segregation. In 1985, the District Court ruled in Kansas City’s favor and ordered, among other things, the construction of magnet schools to attract white students. Ten years later, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s ruling, insisting that Brown v. Board of Education applied only to laws mandating

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  • excerpt • April 11, 2018

    A Poet of the Archives: On Susan Howe

    “Only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals,” writes Susan Howe in the foreword to her new collection, Debths, inspired in part by the Whitney’s 2011 retrospective of American artist Paul Thek.

    I have always been interested in folktales, magic, lost languages, riddles, coincidence, and missed connections. What struck me most was the way [Thek’s] later works, often painted swatches of color spread across sheets of newspaper with single words, phrases, or letters scribbled over the already doubled surface, transformed these so-called “art

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  • review • April 10, 2018

    Goddess of Anarchy by Jacqueline Jones

    More than a century before Antifa or Occupy Wall Street, thousands showed up to hear lectures on wealth inequality and its discontents from Lucy Parsons, the subject of Jacqueline Jones engrossing new biography, Goddess of Anarchy. A former slave, Parsons transformed herself from a rural seamstress with only the “bare bones of a formal education” into a revolutionary essayist, orator, and celebrity. Railing against the Dickensian horrors of capitalism from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, Parsons was one of the few female activists of color to capture a mass audience. But despite

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  • excerpt • April 03, 2018

    Home Is Where the Art Is

    Last month, the Feminist Press at CUNY and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop published Go Home!, an anthology of Asian diasporic writers exploring belonging, identity, family, place, and the myriad other topics that come into play when considering the notion of “home.” We invited the AAWW’s Ken Chen and the Feminist Press’s Jisu Kim to discuss the book with its editor, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, and contributors Amitava Kumar, Alexander Chee, and Wo Chan. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

    Ken Chen: Rowan, Can you talk about why you decided to put together this

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  • review • April 03, 2018

    Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment by Rachel Carson

    If you were to saunter through the spruce-scented church of American environmentalism, looking upon the portraits of its saints, you’d first see John Muir, father of the Sierra Club, defender of the Yosemite, a green Abraham with a mossy old-man’s beard. Next to him, his camping companion, Teddy Roosevelt, protector of nearly 230 million acres of land. You’d find Aldo Leopold, whose A Sand County Almanac (1949) has become a sacred text. David Brower, whom John McPhee called “the sacramentarian of ecologia americana, the Archdruid himself,” director of Muir’s Sierra Club and founder of both

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    Daring to Be Good

    At a certain point in January 2018, “second-wave” seemed to have become a slur. “The Backlash to #MeToo Is Second-Wave Feminism,” declared a post on Jezebel—referring to Katie Roiphe, Daphne Merkin, and Catherine Deneuve. A “burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been”: This was what babe.net writer Katie Way called Ashleigh Banfield (b. 1967) after the HLN host criticized Way’s article about Aziz Ansari.

    Though used without any particular regard for historical context or ideological specificity, the term second-wave expressed genuine frustration. To speak of any clear-cut

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  • print • Apr/May 2018

    Crash, Bern

    Fordham sociology professor Heather Gautney went to work in Bernie Sanders’s Senate office on an academic fellowship in 2012 and then signed up for his 2016 presidential campaign, ultimately playing a role in the Sandernistas’ wrangling over the party platform with Hillary Clinton’s DNC apparatchiks at that year’s Democratic convention. To say the least, aiming for a conciliatory note in the aftermath doesn’t interest her much. Especially when she goes prescriptive, reading Crashing the Party: From the Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement(Verso, $17) can feel like watching a bulldozer

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