Posts by author
Adam Keller
-
Dazed And Confused
The network would indeed generate a lot of wealth, but it would be wealth of the Adam Smith sort—and it would be concentrated in a few hands, not widely spread. The culture that emerged on the network, and that now…
-
Macaroni Men
The seemingly non-sequitur first lines of “Yankee Doodle” sound like they’re about food, but Michael Waters in Atlas Obscura reveals the lyrics’ gender-bending history: The Oxford Magazine similarly described the macaroni as not belonging to the gender binary: “There is indeed a kind of…
-
Cook the Books
Cook’s portraits are usually accompanied by texts distilled from interviews she conducts with her subjects (afterward, she says, because she prefers the shoot itself to remain as meditative as possible). This provides her, and her audience, with a verbal layer…
-
All That We Could Do with This Emotion
Writing for the Guardian, novelist Val McDermid disputes the recent study which suggests that “literary” fiction readers are more empathetic than “genre” readers: There is no doubt that, historically, there was a valid distinction. Nobody would attempt to suggest that there is an…
-
Fappetizers
When does food porn become a problem? For The Millions, Davey Davis looks at the spread of the pornographic sensibility to Instagram cuisine: The cumshot is replicated in Instagram food porn, not with the actual consumption of the food but rather…
-
The Chosen One
Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad, was announced as an Oprah’s Book Club selection on the day of its release. Speaking to Michelle Dean in the Guardian, Whitehead discusses his reaction to the news: “I called her back and she said:…
-
Office Space, the Final Frontier
In A.O. Scott’s eyes, summer blockbusters and workplace sitcoms aren’t that different these days: Part of what makes work tolerable is the idea that it is heroic, the fantasy that repetitive and meaningless tasks are charged with risk and significance.…
-
Ghost in the Machine
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Professor Ted Underwood talks about why Digital Humanities, the new discipline he’s often associated with, doesn’t exist: It’s true that [Digital Humanities] can be aligned with managerial thinking—administrators like it. It can also…
-
The Things Abandoned by Hollywood
Thinking about his films while watching an American film leads to a sobering realization: all the things that Kiarostami could not show in his films became the only things Hollywood filmmakers chose to show in theirs. What he showed in…
-
Empire State of Memoir
For Lit Hub, Edward White writes about Jay Z and Morrissey’s experimental memoirs, investigating how both artists indulge and subvert what readers want from a musician’s autobiography: Where Morrissey gives us a conventional autobiography in an unconventional way—no chapters, paragraphs that…