Sublime, Subversive Sappho, and Other News
Simeon Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, 1864. How does contemporary literature derive meaning in the age of big data? “The rise of corporate capitalism, and the astonishing, almost...
View ArticleOur Thing: An Interview with Paul Beatty
Photo: Hannah Assouline Paul Beatty’s recurring themes—race and tribalism, human psychology, ambition and failure, and the haunting presence of history—are the heavy ones. But he moves through them...
View ArticleAddy Walker, American Girl
The role of black dolls in American culture. From the cover of Meet Addy. In 1864, a nine-year-old slave girl was punished for daydreaming. Distracted by rumors that her brother and father would be...
View ArticleLSD for Kids, and Other News
From Super Mario World.Sherman Alexie chose a poem by Yi-Fen Chou, a Chinese American, for this year’s Best American Poetry anthology. But Yi-Fen Chou was a pseudonym, it turned out, for Michael...
View ArticleAddy Walker, American Girl
We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!From the cover of Meet Addy.The role of black dolls in American...
View ArticleMystery
With all the controversy surrounding the renaming of problematic buildings, it seems fitting to draw attention to another bit of suspicious rebranding. Perhaps you’ve seen the BBC miniseries previewed...
View ArticleYou Are on Display: An Interview with Morgan Parker
Photo by Kwesi Abbensetts.Morgan Parker has a long résumé—she teaches and edits—that somehow hasn’t precluded a prolific career as a poet. Her first collection, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at...
View ArticleThat Was Not a Very Nice Thing to Do, and Other News
From the cover of My Brilliant Friend.It’s possible you survived the whole weekend without hearing about the unmasking of Elena Ferrante, whose “true identity” (like those exist!) was revealed...
View ArticleRise Up
Alexander Bedward’s mythical powers of flight.Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a monthly series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history.It’s impossible to know exactly how many...
View ArticleBeing a Bumpkin
Three new books try to untangle the Gordian knot of white-trash identity.From the cover of Hillbilly Elegy. Scan the headlines and you’ll find that everyone’s talking about how the white trash have...
View ArticleLove, Jimmy: Hilton Als and Jacqueline Goldsby in Conversation
Photo: Allan WarrenAt fourteen, James Baldwin “underwent … a prolonged religious crisis” and discovered “God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell.” At the same age, Hilton Als was given a copy...
View ArticleKilling Dirk’s
Photo: Houston StreetwiseSince I moved to Louisiana, every few months I’ve met someone who’s spent time in Montrose. It’s this trendy suburb in Houston, the kind the South’s accused of lacking, and the...
View ArticleHigh Fade
At his barber shop in Paterson, New Jersey, Louis McDowell gives Michael Young a haircut. Photo: Martha Cooper, 1994. My barber in New Orleans works a few blocks from Preservation Hall. His building...
View ArticleBlues to Come
Harriet Tubman’s new album Araminta has a joyous aura of creative destruction. Harriet Tubman In 1967, Thelonious Monk wrote his only waltz: a slow, sweet, faintly melancholy tune he called “Ugly...
View ArticleA Girl Full of Smartness
As an entrepreneur, civil-rights activist, and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush–era San Francisco, shattering racial taboos. Mary Ellen Pleasant....
View ArticleI Started a Joke Which Started the Whole World Crying, and Other News
An illustration of Rabelais’s grotesque Pantagruel by Gustave Doré. Oh, it feels good to laugh! Hot tip: try doing it when there’s nothing to laugh about. Try it in a crowd of stone-faced...
View ArticleWhat’s Wrong with Us: An Interview with J. M. Holmes
Photo by Julie Keresztes. J. M. Holmes’s “What’s Wrong with You? What’s Wrong with Me?” appears in our Summer issue (no. 221); it’s Holmes’s first published story. Next year, it will be included in...
View ArticleWhen Jazz Was Dangerous
“Robinson’s Band Plays Anything,” F. Bildestein, 1890. From the cover of the New Orleans newspaper the Mascot (November 15, 1890). Musical forms have the life cycle of carnivorous beasts: clumsy in...
View ArticleOliver Munday’s Graphic Design with a Conscience
Perhaps the most striking images in Oliver Munday’s new monograph, Don’t Sleep, appear just before the title page. On the left-facing page is a nineteenth-century map of the Senate floor. On the...
View ArticleHow Much Should the Met Cost You?
It will soon be three months since the Metropolitan Museum of Art instituted its new admissions policy: pay what you wish for New Yorkers and tristate students, a discount for the elderly and...
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