'When All Else Fails', Rely Upon Your Wit
Rayyan Al-Shawaf's When All Else Fails is politically complex, and its humor is razor-sharp.
11 Jul 2019
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Nora Krug's 'Belonging' Could Serve as a Model for Understanding Collective Responsibility
In graphic novel Belonging, Nora Krug takes a single idea – her family's involvement in the Second World War and Nazi Germany – and pursues it with relentless, forensic determination.
04 Feb 2019
Social Media and Identity Formation in Bo Burnham’s Film, 'Eighth Grade'
Rather than moralize, critique, or make grandiose statements about "digital natives", writer-director-wunderkind Bo Burnham brilliantly visualizes what it means to live in a world in which social media is omnipresent.
07 Aug 2018
Loss of Memory and Divided Identities in Psychological Thriller 'I Know My Name'
It's risky to build the success of a genre psychological thriller on the incorporation of psychological therapeutic techniques. But in Cooke's hands, it works.
03 Aug 2018
How the Nobel Committee and the Great American Read (Among Others) Got Philip Roth Wrong
A sense of bitterness remains for those of us mourning the loss of this final great literary lion of the 20th century.
24 May 2018
The Deconstructive Irony of Ortberg's 'The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror'
This collection gives us Ortberg's trademark gender-swapping, flipping of accepted norms of good vs evil even while blurring the line between them, and startling backstories that do not always reveal underlying motivations but definitely add dark, ironic humor.
19 Mar 2018
Do We Dream of Electric Sheep Like Blade Runner's Corporate-produced Replicants?
The isolation of Blade Runner 2049's inhabitants continually reinforces and enlivens their deep need for genuine connection, communal relationships, which the divisive effects of global capitalism actively undermines.
06 Mar 2018
Male Sexual Fluidity and Undue Complexity in Mostly Straight
Mostly Straight is a mostly inadequate answer to the question of male sexual fluidity.
28 Feb 2018
Film and Reality in Flux: Interview With A Fantastic Woman's Sebastián Lelio
"... (I)n a way we are all trans, we are not fixed beings, we are not one thing, we are constantly changing."
26 Feb 2018
'Yellow Negroes' Draws the Plight of Undocumented Lives
The liminal state between immigrant and citizen becomes the permanent experience of undocumented people.
23 Feb 2018
'What Is Sex?'
Psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher Alenka Zupančič provides a brief, difficult, yet ultimately rewarding look at the "otherness" of sex as an act, as identity, as communication.
07 Feb 2018
'1997' Explores Laying the Groundwork for Brexit and Beyond
Richard Power Sayeed's fascinating look at the optimism of New Labour and Cool Britannia in 1997, and the subsequent agony which followed.
25 Jan 2018
Coming-out Narratives in Comics
My Brother's Husband, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, and Generations illustrate how comics artists continue to excel at depicting complex, meaningful coming-out narratives.
11 Jan 2018
Literary reactions to cultural implosion
After Ireland considers the changing culture, the changing identity, and a fast-changing Ireland in the varied voices and languages of its literature.
10 Jan 2018
For People of Color, 'Real American' Is a Memoir with Big Questions
Julie Lythcott-Haims gives a voice to the internal dialogue—the self-loathing, really—of living a life as a biracial woman who, for most of her life, wasn't quite sure if she was allowed to call herself black.
13 Dec 2017
Personal Identity and Gaming in Today's Political Landscape
Video games have made me used to inhabiting the skin of others. For many of us, this is one of the biggest reasons we play games.
01 Dec 2016
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