Culture January 1, 1

On the cover of Noah Isenberg’s new anthology, a nearly naked woman, her head adorned with radiating feathers and her breasts covered only by bejeweled pasties, stares at us with heavily raccooned eyes and a slight smirk that betrays a calculated cool. The hard yet seductive gaze is Maria’s, or rather that of her false double, the robot that inventor Rotwang created to lead the workers to self-destruction in Fritz Lang’s 1927 science-fiction fantasy, Metropolis. The image is well chosen. Promiscuity and male anxiety, medieval witchcraft and state-of-the-art special effects, displaced class struggle and visionary utopianism, doppelgängers, vampires, and golems—these