Posts by author
Jeremy Hatch
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Movies Briefly: New Muslim Cool
One of the highlights of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival was the documentary New Muslim Cool, by director Jennifer Maytorena Taylor. It’s about Hamza (Jason) Perez, pictured above at left, an extraordinary person whose life evolved from that…
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New York Runs Deep
Today Alexis Madrigal linked to a National Geographic page that features a scale rendering of New York City from the surface down. It’s just a schematic cross-section, not an actual map of the city’s underground, because it’s actually not possible to create…
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Nicholson Baker Tries Kindle, Finds it Wanting
If you know anything about Nicholson Baker, you know that he has an unparalleled talent for describing the small and ordinary things in everyday life, their textures and surfaces and the way they heft in the hand; and more than…
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Richard Nash’s Next Venture
“Soft Skull began at a Kinko’s in 1993 courtesy of Adobe and Xerox. It started with fewer resources and far less maturity and experience than, say, Seven Stories, Arcade, Manic D or New Press. But we all benefited from the…
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Time is Real!
Not too long ago I reviewed a movie called The Examined Life, by director Astra Taylor, which featured ninety minutes of fascinating, exhilarating discussions with eight contemporary philosophers. The film left me hungry for more, and recently The New Press…
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Was Re: Skinny Jeans
“Every semester that I teach my underground music course, I ask my students what they think the word ‘indie’ means, and somebody inevitably gives the same answer: skinny pants. I want to come clean here and tell everyone that I…
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Wallace Shawn On Writing About Sex
“Various people who have liked me or cared about me — people who have believed in my promise as a writer — have hinted to me at various times in my life that an excessive preoccupation with the subject of…
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When The Rent’s Due Soon
“After opening my post on many mornings, I indulge in a few minutes of anguish and muted screams, then devote the next hour or more, if necessary, to tackling the mess. When I have satisfied myself that I have done…
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Eclectic Method: Pushing the Frontier of Video Remix
It’s hard to know where to start talking about a club act as innovative as Eclectic Method. They’re video DJs, a rare breed of performance artist, who have taken the tools of music DJs — turntables, scratching, sampling, live looping,…
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Milton Glaser Remembers Nabokov
Shortly after I posted a story about an author’s experience of book design, I accidentally opened my copy of McSweeney’s 4, which consisted of a box of pamphlets, and I found that one pamphlet comprised an essay by Paul Maliszewski,…
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Scott Rosenberg’s Thoughts on Twitter
Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon who has written a fascinating history of blogging (in time, we’ll be interviewing him about his book), recently wrote up his thoughts on Twitter in two posts: how Twitter differs from blogging, how it…
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Walter Benjamin’s Translation Machine
“The device itself looked for all the world like an Underwood typewriter, at once sleek and erect. In place of the roller carriage, however, rose a stately glass dome, like that on a ticker tape machine (when inverted, the dome…