Omnivore
Sports and the cult of execution
Justin Landy, Daniel Walco, and Daniel M. Bartels (Chicago): What’s Wrong with Using Steroids? Exploring Whether and Why People Oppose the Use of Performance Enhancing Drugs. The ridiculous saga of Lance Armstrong, the cheater who became an enemy of the state. Are physical limits all in our heads? We are nowhere close to the limits of athletic performance: Genetic engineering will bring us new Bolts and Shaqs. Rognvaldur D. Ingthorsson (Lund): Is Competitive Elite Sport Really Morally Corrupt?
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Paper Trail
In her Medium pop-up magazine Unruly Bodies, Roxane Gay writes about her difficult decision to undergo weight reduction surgery. “I worried that people would think I betrayed fat positivity, something I do very much believe in even if I can’t always believe in it for myself. I worried that everyone who responded so generously to …Syllabi
Marriage Reimagined
Laura SmithIt is easy to view the vast and varied landscape of marriage in the present day as a radical departure from a more conservative past. But many of these marriage alternatives—including polyamory, open …- "We Are Revolution": Introducing Asia's Proletarian Lit Matt Turner
- The Manson Family Eric Banks
Daily Review
A Neutral Innocence of the Heart
Picture the carefree swagger of a teenage white boy, shirtless and smooth, swinging himself into a pristine tree-lined body of water from a rope as if there were no history, no context, no world. Instead, simply the body and the self it manages, flying gracefully with no net, nothing to carry that body to safety but its own faith that nothing will squash it down. … 
Interviews
Wayne Koestenbaum
Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that in representational writing, “one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature . . . and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” In Wayne Koestenbaum’s “trance journals”—The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and the newly released Camp Marmalade—both the frame and the off-frame are folded into his trans-perspectival impressions.
…- Vladimir Nabokov saw the beginnings of literature in a familiar idiom. He imagined a …
- I OF THE FEW real-life intrusions into The Solitary Twin, the final novel by Harry …
- A fan of Alan Hollinghurst’s masterpiece The Line of Beauty has created a Twitter …
- TAO LIN’S EIGHTH BOOK, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs. Well, …
- “Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own,” Aleksandr …
- When I was in a suicidal phase in my life and hiding my alcoholism from my partner, …
- PICTURE THE CAREFREE SWAGGER of a teenage white boy, shirtless and smooth, swinging …
- When Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation came out in 2014, I couldn’t elbow my way to …
Reviews
Essay
A Poet of the Archives: On Susan Howe
Emily LaBarge
Howe has long been interested in distilling signs and symbols, whether “art objects” or words themselves, into something more revelatory. Considering riddles, lost languages, doubled surfaces, spells, magical thinking, and other elusive forms of expression, Howe sounds the depths.
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