Rural Art Hero
Thesley Beverly is the art czar, and maybe the heart and soul, of Pembroke, Illinois, population 2800.
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Jesse Nathan
43 posts
Jesse Nathan is an editor at McSweeney’s and the managing editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading. His poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, the American Poetry Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Nation. He was born in Berkeley, grew up in Kansas, and lives now in San Francisco.
A Change in the Air?
“Something is happening in artists’ studios: a shift of emphasis, from surface to depth, and a shift of mood, from mania to melancholy, shrugging off the allures of the money-hypnotized…
Yelling ‘Bout Yelp
The San Francisco-based website Yelp allows users to post reviews of businesses. The idea’s simple enough: trust consumers to tell you the truth about the kind of service you’ll get…
The Bin Laden Machine
Only a few genetic lines–the Hapsburgs, the Hans, the Roosevelts, for instance–have shaped geopolitics as much as the Bin Ladens. In his NYRB review of Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens,…
Random Brilliant Ephemera
“I won’t pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything,” says Luc Sante, introducing his blog, Pinakothek. “Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my…
Fiction by La Farge
The long short-story is not a particularly popular form, but Paul La Farge packs life into exactly that bag. It’s a bag Kafka and Chekov used with gusto–think of the…
Ivan Brunetti
Ivan Brunetti’s excruciating but brilliant explanation of the state of his art-making (plus the story of what happened between him and the cartoon character Nancy). As far as the grand…
The Last Bastion of Jim Crow
The Order of Myths is a film too nuanced to confront lynching directly, and too focused to make any easy statement about racism.
Jorge Luis Borges: “Reading has to be a happiness”
“For me death is a hope, the irrational certitude of being abolished, erased and forgotten,” says Borges in this 1984 interview conducted by Professor of Philosophy Tomas Abraham, translated here…
The Silence of Thousands of Miles
A Review of Matthew Eck’s The Farther Shore “The war is now a story. How will it get told?” – William T. Vollmann
The Rumpus Interview With General Laurent Nkunda
“What I know is that we are conducting a war of liberation”