Posts by author
Jesse Nathan
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Rural Art Hero
Thesley Beverly is the art czar, and maybe the heart and soul, of Pembroke, Illinois, population 2800.
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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 market and the spectacle-bedizened biennials circuit.” So wrote New Yorker…
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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 at this or that restaurant, or the kind of waits…
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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, Frank Halliday details Coll’s methodical deconstruction of the inner workings…
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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 pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.” Sante…
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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 Metamorphosis or The Duel. In Bleak College Days, La Farge…
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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 scheme of comics this is like a little note scribbled…
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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.
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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 for the first time into English. “When I’m sad, I…
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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
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The Rumpus Interview With General Laurent Nkunda
“What I know is that we are conducting a war of liberation”