culture
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How Langston Hughes Inspired #TweetYourThobe
Langston, I am finally at the table, eating with everyone.
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Smoke Screen
I am an oracle who, while dispensing answers to all those who seek them, cannot predict my own future.
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Multitudes: The Practice of Forgetting
I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
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The Brisbane Effect
For The New Republic, Suki Kim writes of Lionel Shriver’s remarks in Brisbane, “I had been invited to the Brisbane Writers Festival as a writer, but now I was here, foremost, as an Asian” and how the controversy shifted the…
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A Japanese Heart
If you follow the script, people will judge you as having a genuine Japanese heart.
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Embracing Brutalism
Brutalist architecture—those hulking, concrete buildings from the mid-1950s to mid-1970s—is making a quiet comeback in popularity. A new book by Christopher Beanland, Concrete Concept explores why: And the sheer variety of these “brutalist beasts,” in cities from Birmingham to Madrid…
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It’s Literally Fine
At the Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance defends teenagers’ ever-maligned contributions to the lexicon, citing a recent student that examines the extent to which teens influence linguistic change: And the thing about linguistic changes is they can’t exactly be stopped in any…
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Publishing in an Age of Immediacy
As the value of an individual book is devalued, so is the self. We are made to feel that it’s only through constant communication with a community that we have any collective power. How has the immediacy of the Internet…
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Building the Idea of Home
At JSTOR Daily, Livia Gershon offers a brief history of the concept of “home.” Gershon traces the changes not only in the emerging role of the home as a private retreat, but also the people who could define a household…
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Writers Respond to Art
A new exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum mixes visual art with writing: “Storylines” is about the resurgence of narrative in the visual arts, but it is also about how writers still love to write about the things artists make. In…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Cultural Constellations of Agee and Smith
But who said a chronology had to be straightforward?
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The End of Literature
The digital age threatens works of serious literary merit, warns British novelist Will Self: Back when I began publishing novels, not only did the reviews in the quality press mean something – in terms of sales, yes, but also as…