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As We Saw Ourselves
October 04, 2016
On September 4, 1957, Carlotta Walls LaNier and eight other African American students tried to enter Central High School in Little Rock, but the students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard. The dress that LaNier wore that ...

Spreading the Bad News
September 16, 2016
For dogged observers of America’s long-running culture wars, a quiet milestone was reached this year: the fortieth anniversary of pop theologian Francis Schaeffer’s enormously influential 1976 tract How Should We Then Live? This portentously titled, slim volume ...

Gone with the Winds
August 29, 2016
When a hurricane strikes, and is destructive or deadly enough, its name will be retired. For this to happen, the storm will have had to inflict so much damage that to reuse its name would be, according to the National Hurricane Center, a serious faux pas for “obvious reasons ...

Lo How a Trump E’er (Stinkily) Blooming
August 01, 2016
I first caught wind of the blooming of the New York Botanical Garden’s corpse flower—a titan arum, more properly termed—during the Republican National Convention, when caretakers first announced that their ten years of careful labor, watering and fertilizing a ...

Punk Rock and Protest
July 07, 2016
Growing up, I learned the word solidarity from a vocabulary flash card. It was not something I had ever felt until my shoe became untied in the mosh pit at a NOFX concert in the early 2000s. When I knelt to re-tie it, four strangers formed a wall around my crouching body to ...

Flu in the Face
February 04, 2016
Anyone who spends time in enclosed public spaces is barraged with images from television news, most often broadcast from the default network, CNN. We glimpse these images, with the sound down, for only seconds at a time as they bounce, germ-like, from corner to corner, chasing ...

Waiving the Age of Reason
January 05, 2016
Most kids start to learn their multiplication tables in the third grade. Their storybooks—typically illustrated, with only a few sentences per page—begin to give way to short chapter books. A year later, they are taught the difference between sedimentary and volcanic rock. ...

High Caliber Television
December 17, 2015
The planned launch of Gun TV, a home-shopping channel devoted exclusively to selling firearms to impulsive shut-ins, is an idea so purely American that one can only marvel that it’s taken this long to come to life. The mass marketing of lethal weaponry to the bored and ...

A Tale of Two Citations
December 15, 2015
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend, an English teacher in a Brooklyn public school, began preparing to teach her tenth-grade students The Metamorphosis. She asked me for a few examples of the Kafkaesque. I had two: first, a French thriller I saw in high school, in which a man with a ...

Bending Toward Real Justice
July 02, 2015
In the moving celebrations that came in the wake of the SCOTUS decision legalizing gay marriage in America last week, the White House and Empire State Building were both bathed in a commemorative rainbow light and the Washington D.C. Gay Men’s Chorus sang a stirring ...

The Permanent War on Terror: Only As Old As It Feels
July 01, 2015
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the declaration of the Islamic State. The most infamous cult of ultra-violent millenarian revolutionists since the Khmer Rouge celebrated the event in characteristic style: by murdering some people. On Friday, terrorist attacks in ...

The Branded, the Sponsored, and the Native
June 26, 2015
The name of Samsung’s new advertising campaign for its Galaxy 6 and 6 Edge devices coos with the consumer-soothing cadences of a practiced therapist, or masseuse: “The 30-Minute Recharge: Connectivity Without Concern.” In reality, though, the campaign has all ...