The Likability of Unlikability in Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’
Elizabeth Strout counters Olive Kitteridge’s unpleasantness with two of the most important, traits of a standout character: the Ghost and the Lie.
book feature
‘Doom’ Illustrates Niall Ferguson’s Historical Flaws
While historian Niall Ferguson’s broad survey of human catastrophe, Doom, has erudition, insight, and sweep, it is frequently derailed by contrarian carping.
How Could F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ NOT Mention the Flu Pandemic of 1918?
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his literary contemporaries ignored the 1918-1919 pandemic. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
Capitalism Chemistry or ‘Drug Use for Grown-ups’
Our capitalist language of minute gradations and improvised adjustments—of the plasticity of bodies and minds—places drugs in the service of economies of labor, production, and value.
No One Asked Ian Brennan to “Show Me Don’t Tell Me” and It Shows
I had to take numerous breaks while reading Silenced by Sound. Ian Brennan’s self-righteous clairvoyance would just not stop beating me over the head.
Ronald Brownstein Celebrates and Elegizes LA’s ’70s-Era Cultural Dominance
Ronald Brownstein’s ode to ’70s Los Angeles is, like so many California stories, less about a sustained moment than a bright and briefly thrilling mirage.
Celebrity Stylist Andrew Gelwicks Has a Queer Advantage
Andrew Gelwicks interviews celebrities and other “beautiful people” who have come out of the closet and benefited from it.
‘Black Against Empire’ Assumes a Central and Critical Spot within the Black Panther Canon
Black Against Empire attempts something beyond the scope of power-to-the-people flashbacks of Afros, dashikis, and raised fists: it takes the Black Panther Party seriously as a political entity taking dead aim on American laws and values.
Truths Overlap in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Memoir of German Reunification, ‘Not a Novel’
Living under the repressive East German regime taught its citizens to distrust their government and read through the lines of its proclamations to glean the reality of a situation, Jenny Erpenbeck explains in Not a Novel.
How the Cultural Revolution Turned China Against Itself
Yang Jisheng's remarkable historical autopsy, The World Turned Upside Down, is scrupulous in detailing the Cultural Revolution's horrors and insanities but too often leaves out the human side of history.
Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (excerpt)
Ikette Claudia Lennear, rumored to be the inspiration for Mick Jagger's "Brown Sugar", often felt disconnect between her identity as an African American woman and her engagement with rock. Enjoy this excerpt of cultural anthropologist Maureen Mahon's Black Diamond Queens, courtesy of Duke University Press.
Jack Halberstam’s ‘Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire’ (excerpt)
Enjoy this excerpt of Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, wherein Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the 20th century.