When, on February 6, New York’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner finally announced that “Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine . . . [and] that the manner of death is an accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications,” […]
It is a shopworn stereotype that comics shops are dank holes of nerddom, in which flabby, ponytailed men argue the finer points of Spider-Man’s relationship with Mary Jane over a game of Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering. More recently, though, there’s a new breed of shop on the scene, one that offers a […]
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So,” I say to Daniel Menaker, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker and for six years a senior editor at Random House, later executive editor in chief. “How did you get into an editorial career?” He looks me straight in the eye and says, “How did you get into one?” Asking questions while […]
This summer, the world will turn its eyes toward China to watch the Olympic flame take its first-ever journey to the People’s Republic. Over the course of about two weeks in August, Beijing will present us with the greatest spectacle on earth. The makeover of the capital city will be complete: construction projects finished, buildings repainted, streets spotless, children smiling, and Communist Party officials happily applauding the dazzling sporting feats of the visiting nations.
Absorbing Chinese philosophy through the dispositif of French philosophy can strike one as retranslation at its most unwelcome, like channeling Ismail Kadare from Albanian through French to English or playing the childhood game of Telephone in high-cultural mode. We all prefer nonstop flights to connections, original-language films to the hopelessly dubbed. For the non-French reader, it’s only sensible to approach François Jullien, the magisterial French ponderer of Chinese thought and language, with caution.
Earth art, that consummately American movement that sprang up during the high–Vietnam War era, combined a steely-eyed commitment to the truth of materials and to the power of basic geometric forms with a desire to get off the grid or at the very least “expand the field” of sculpture. Sometimes called environmental or Land art, or Earthworks, depending on its practitioner, it demanded of its actual, physical viewers—“fit, though few,” as John Milton might have said—a pilgrim’s willingness to go on the road to remote places in order to see the works and experience the landscapes that they reframed and
The prolific anthologist and writer Alberto Manguel has become, since the publication in 1996 of A History of Reading, one of the foremost gentleman scholars of books and the act of consuming them. In 2000, he wrote Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate, which narrates the stories told by an idiosyncratic selection of artworks and images, and he followed that in 2004 with A Reading Diary, which chronicles his experience rereading twelve favorite books in a year. Now, in The Library at Night, Manguel meditates on repositories of books, his thoughts provoked by the construction, next to his
I grew up in the town of Enniscorthy, in the southeast of Ireland. Every year in the summer, we held a strawberry fair, and every year, too, the elders would meet to select a Strawberry Queen. One year, they asked a contestant what she would do with the prize money if she won. “I’d feck off to England,” she said.
Though he lacks Will Eisner’s urbane, insouciant spirit and Jack Cole’s sensuous, ever-surprising plasticity, comic-book artist Jack Kirby (1917–94) more than deserves the royal sobriquet with which he’s been crowned. King Kirby embodies the drama of his medium as well as the drama of its history—how, starting on the eve of World War II, a bunch of mainly working-class, first-generation Jewish kids created a garish, subliterary mythology of fantastic supermen. Kirby’s first such creature, created with Joe Simon, was Captain America: The premiere issue, which appeared nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, has the masked and star-spangled hero using his
In the winter of 1831, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, creator and appreciator of all things Kunst, was feeling blue. His loyal attendants, sympathetic to the great man’s depression, had heard of a taciturn Genevan educator who, in his spare time, wrote and drew farcical picture-stories to amuse himself and his students. So Frédéric Soret, tutor to the Duke of Weimar’s children and translator of one of Goethe’s scientific works, obtained one of these illustrated manuscripts and, placing it into Goethe’s hands, stepped aside. Thankfully, the gamble paid off: Goethe found the book “very amusing,” and it gave him “extraordinary pleasure,”
More than four decades have passed since readers made the acquaintance of a figure who has assumed an almost mythological role in the stories that are sometimes told about the way we live now. This was the bricoleur, introduced into the cultural conversation by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the opening pages of The Savage Mind at the high tide of structuralism in the early 1960s. The bricoleur is, simply, a kind of handyman. Unlike the carpenter or the electrician, he has no particular set of tools or domain of expertise. He can perform any number of tasks, but his knack is
A last gasp of sorts—or maybe a sputter—The Devil Gets His Due collects fifty years’ worth of criticism from that other rebellious Jewish literary son of Newark, Leslie Fiedler. Once the bad boy of cultural crit, Fiedler today seems quaint, which isn’t exactly his fault. By now, everybody—or at least everybody acquainted with cultural studies—knows what was really going on between Ishmael and Queequeg, but Fiedler was there first in 1948, when he argued for the centrality of the homoerotic male bond and the “dark skinned beloved” to American literature in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”
Soccer’s global appeal has few analogues. The “world” in World Cup is a much larger place than, say, the one in World Series: Some seven hundred million people are reported to have watched the tournament’s final game in 2006, and the roster of fifa’s member nations is a virtual facsimile of the UN’s. In The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, David Goldblatt argues that the sport has become “our collective metaphor,” one that “expresses the Faustian bargain that all modern societies have made with the forces of money and power.” His book provides a scrupulous account of
When Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, opined that “Spengler was an optimist,” the world finally had the obiter dictum to sum up the trenchant doomism at the heart of the cold-warrior mentality—and the coldest of the cold warriors were at the rand Corporation, where Schlesinger had worked before ascending to the secretariat. In fact, his quip would serve well as rand’s motto.
In the decades following the Revolutionary War, Americans had an opportunity––at once exhilarating and terrifying—to shape not just the politics of their new nation but also its culture. British political models abounded, of course: Thoughtful citizens could argue for William Godwin’s radical aesthetics, adopt a Shaftesburian “moral sense,” or compare Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution with that of Thomas Paine. The cultural apparatus of America was likewise an import. But for all its access to the most exalted offerings of Europe, the young United States should not be idealized as the genteel, genius offspring of cultivated parents: It
The American West is a region of subtle, folksy flavors, each state characterized by an externally reinforced image: Colorado radiates an aura of upscale hippie crunch, Texas struts strike-it-big bling, Utah dazzles under the long shadow of Mormonism (and Sundance), and New Mexico pipes out a pleasing desert spirituality.
This is a book about a contemporary phenomenon that is crucially important, utterly terrifying, and largely ignored. In AK-47: The Story of a Gun, Michael Hodges, a British journalist, charts the spread of the titular weapon—especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—and the ways in which the gun virtually guarantees the continued implosion of failed states and the intensification of terrorist violence. For thousands, perhaps millions, of people, the AK has developed “a cultural velocity” that has proved to be “both irresistible and catastrophic,” Hodges writes. It is not just a weapon but an unmaker of whole societies,
The sly comedian of the New York School, artist and author Joe Brainard managed in his trademark “I Remember” poems to transform autobiography’s obscure intimacies into near-epic epiphanies—“I remember the only time I saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.” The legerdemain was accomplished through deftly discordant juxtaposition, and the same handiwork is […]
A personal aside: When Colin De Land died in 2003 at age forty-seven, Artforum titled its tribute to him “Shaggy Dogg.” It was one of the most apt titles the magazine ever came up with. First at Vox Populi, the East Village gallery he opened in the early ’80s on East Sixth Street, then at […]
