The Nation
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Cyber Stalking Really Is That Bad
Caleb Crain over at The Nation digs in deep to James Lasdun’s new memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, the seemingly terrifying story of his “persecution on the internet by a clever, mentally unbalanced person.” The cyber-harassment (a wildly tame description…
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“What It’s Like to be a Problem”
At The Nation, Melissa Harris-Perry breaks down the wider political context surrounding the Trayvon Martin killing, outlining the historical and contemporary reality in which it is “acceptable to presume the guilt” of black bodies. “Liberal democracy—based on commitment to individual…
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On Zoe Strauss and Thinking Big
At The Nation, Barry Schwabsky writes about photographer Zoe Strauss’ “Ten Years” exhibition. Exploring Strauss’ evolving approach to photographic techniques, portraiture and storytelling, Schwabsky argues that her artistic triumphs come from “thinking big”. “Strauss’s work was a runaway from birth,…
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Fractured Systems
The Nation explores the poetry of Juliana Spahr, Noah Eli Gordon, Anna Moschovakis and Kathleen Ossip, articulating how all four poets react to “big modern systems,” while rendering compounded emotions. “In paths through and under and around those systems, economic,…
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On Ann Beattie
“Beattie is an artist of silence, of the things we don’t say or can’t, the things that find expression anyway. She is an artist of the space between the words—of commas and dashes and periods; of section breaks, blank spaces…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Baumgardner
Jennifer Baumgardner, a third wave feminist and activist, discusses archiving, zines, Bjork and her new book, F ’em!: Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls.
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“Hacktivism and Social Change”
In this Nation Conversations audio interview, reporter Laurie Penny takes a closer look at how digital resistance groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec have enabled protests from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. She breaks down the relationship between…
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Women and Elegy
“In earlier times, when a woman’s response to the death of a beloved may have been limited to suicide, euphemism or enforced silence, these shaped works of art would not have existed.” Focusing on recent poetry by Susan Howe, Gertrude…
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Language Therapy
Should doctors be prescribing languages instead of pharmaceuticals? The Nation‘s Ange Mlinko ponders the potentially transformative relationship between a second language and the self.
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The Decline Of Hitchens, Again
A long time ago, back when I was basking in over-priced Leftism in Santa Cruz, I gave a gift to my friend: Letters To A Yong Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens. At that time Hitchens was a venom-tongued writer for the…
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“Are people who write entirely & absolutely selfish, darling?”
In the last Nation, Michelle Orange picks apart A Life in Letters, a book of Graham Greene’s correspondence edited by Richard Greene (no relation, really, she checked).