At the end of November 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death.

Not all stars have star presence, and those with star presence don’t always become stars. It’s easier to quantify stardom—through box-office receipts, salary per picture, dressing-room size—than it is to qualify star presence. Richard Dyer, the British scholar who helped establish star studies roughly thirty years ago, helped pin down this elusive, almost ineffable term when he wrote, with bracing simplicity, in 1993, “Stars are things that shine brightly in the darkness.” But even the more useful, concrete descriptors of star presence that Dyer’s formulation points to—luminosity, transcendence—are themselves often vague concepts, always subjective and hard to define precisely. In

One of the many unnamed intelligence officials quoted in Chris Woods’s Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars declares that the drone is “the most precise weapon in the history of warfare.” It is a claim that’s repeated throughout the book. For General David Deptula, who oversaw the Air Force drone program in its early years, this aerial tool represents a radical departure from “the industrial age of warfare,” when pilots would simply drop thousands of unguided tons of ordinance in the general direction of their targets. Drones, which can loiter over a target for days, if not weeks, are capable

Ph.D. students famously despair that the academic dissertation, as a literary genre, is inherently boring to the point of unreadable, while joking that the difficulty of writing one is enough to drive a person insane. The number of those who actually do go insane is small. For Barbara Taylor, the trouble began when she got it into her head that her dissertation was going to be, in a literary sense, really good. Then a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Sussex in England, Taylor was writing about the Owenites, a minor group of nineteenth-century English utopians. As a

Is the phrase “a farce set in art school” redundant? Cate Dicharry’s first novel takes that view, and while this position could easily be insufferable as well as unnecessary—hitting the broad side of a barn is not exactly a daring challenge—she makes it an unvarnished delight. This is an especially wise authorial move given how well-worked a genre the campus novel is—and how brave or even foolhardy it is to follow the likes of Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell. Yet contrary to the opinion of some (“Last rites for the campus novel”), the genre is not over, or

Since the invention of messianism, every generation, regular as clockwork, wonders if it might be the last. History is planted thick with prophets of the end times: John of Patmos, David Koresh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Some make for better reading than others.

Dennis Cooper’s latest book, Zac’s Haunted House, was released online in mid-January by the Paris-based small press and label Kiddiepunk. Dubbed an “html novel” and offered as a free download, it consists of seven html files, each of which expands into a long, vertical scroll of animated gifs. You could call Zac’s Haunted House many things: net art, a glorified Tumblr, a visual novel, a mood board, or a dark night of the Internet’s soul. It has just a few words—the chapter titles and a few subtitles embedded in some of the gifs—but it still very clearly belongs to Cooper’s