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In Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, the intrepid Adam Minter sets off to find some answers, traveling from his home in Malaysia to interview cleaners, sellers, sorters, exporters, and importers in Japan, India, West Africa, and North America. Whatever their specialty, few of Minter’s experts are optimistic about the future of the

Continue reading Landfill Fodder: On Adam Minter’s “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale”

In the second season, the brutal death of Maeve Millay’s black daughter is the crux of the plot. Ford — is a replica of Ford’s original partner Arnold. You have to swallow these things and put them aside to keep reading, keep watching. Their mothers’ faces — eyes and mouths shuttered tight to not let

Continue reading Do Black Lives Matter to Westworld? On TV Fantasies of Racial Violence

That fog has cut both ways. Of these, argues Stokes, special interest groups have the greatest potential to either amplify or short the circuits of energy policy. Utilities realized that solar threatened their business model, and so the state’s largest private utility, Arizona Public Service Company (APS), spent $11 million in the 2014 election for

Continue reading Energy Policy: Will Special Interest Groups Short-Circuit Our Future?

He quotes from an 1893 girls’ primary-school textbook that “a woman’s good speech should not jar one’s ear, but should be soft and lovable, and should not talk reason. What began in the United States as casualness has devolved into carelessness, and, to my ears, everyday American language now often borders on incoherent. One could

Continue reading What Do They Know of English, Who Only English Know? On Gaston Dorren’s “Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages” and “Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages”

I am working on a short story collection right now that is looking at fairy tales through that lens. And that assumes that society is responsible for mitigating all aspects of disability and that’s also not right. I want to see more stories like that: where the world is changing around the disabled person rather

Continue reading The Stories We Tell About Disability: A Conversation with Amanda Leduc

Halfway into the first verse Little Richie chimed in, “What are you fools listening to? A moment of safety. Why did you shoot him?” His eyes were filling with tears. It had happened many times among them, and if Nester reacted, they’d spend the night trying to calm drunken slurs of “fuck that fool.” Manny

Continue reading renegades, Maybe: A Short Story

— LARB Editorial Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Malcolm X Today Brad Evans – June 1, 2020 Brad Evans speaks with Kehinde Andrews, whose latest book is “Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century.”… And for a larger selection of Evans’s work, check out Atrocity Exhibition, published last year

Continue reading Varieties of Violence

All three books are excellent, though there is considerable overlap among them. I’m not ashamed to prevail.” More perceptive than her credulous husband, Anne begins to fret that Strickland is mocking them — planning to depict them as, in essence, the slightly dull, vaguely pompous middle-class couple that they are. They were unforgiving of mistakes.

Continue reading The News They Wanted Not to Hear: On Robert Stone

JUNE 2, 2020 ROBERT ALTER’S NEW TRANSLATION of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, is a beautiful example of not only why translation matters but also of how translation matters. Translations of the Bible into English proliferated in the 20th century, with each translator (or group of translators) usually having one denominational audience in mind,

Continue reading Thou Shalt Show: On Robert Alter’s Translation of the Hebrew Bible

And “the huge downside to virtual programs is that people expect them to be free” — even though, as Parsons notes, “they’re not free to produce!” Across the San Francisco Bay, City Arts and Lectures has been making the effort to reincarnate their cancelled conversation series online. Since stay-at-home orders were first issued in March, I’ve

Continue reading The Online Pivot: California’s Cultural Institutions Adjust to the New Reality

Part of the reason for his popularity was his condemnation of Whiteness, for which audience often have an almost Catholic self-flagellation obsession with (see Whiteness as a psychosis). But in Black Studies we talk about the need to “colonize” the university, using the privileges and resources of the space to support movements for liberation off

Continue reading Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Malcolm X Today

If you haven’t watched that wonderfully weird series, the way that the characters — who are imprisoned by a charismatically evil scientist and trapped together in a basement separated from one another by glass boxes — negotiate their captivity is through the dance movements that they learn in dreams (yes, the show is wonderfully weird) and

Continue reading Dance Routines, Pandemic Routines: Ryan Heffington’s “SWEATFEST”

While it’s tempting to read the Soira skeptics as having embraced a modern materialist skepticism about God, it’s important not to project a post-Enlightenment atheism back onto them, even as there’s certainly an “emergent” quality to their thought (to borrow Raymond Williams’s language). What Almond emphasizes is how the bodily God disbelieved by contemporary atheists

Continue reading Burying Nobodaddy: What Is “God” Even Supposed to Mean?

At the inaugural Festival mondial des arts nègres (World Festival of Black Arts), 1966 in Dakar, Senegal, the company staged Aimé Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe (La Tragédie du roi Christophe, 1963) to popular acclaim, though by then Maldoror had already moved on. The Rich are the Poor’s enemies, they see to it

Continue reading The Mother of African Cinema: Sarah Maldoror

Are they safe amid the global pandemic raging around all of us? He could sing pop in a way that sounded like the most skilled mu’ezzin reciting the call to prayer. At the same time, musicians trained in more traditional idioms created another popular form that some scholars writing in English have called “New Folk.”

Continue reading The Politics of Pop: The Rise and Repression of Uyghur Music in China