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
Category: Booking
Do Black Lives Matter to Westworld? On TV Fantasies of Racial Violence
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
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Energy Policy: Will Special Interest Groups Short-Circuit Our Future?
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
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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”
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
The Stories We Tell About Disability: A Conversation with Amanda Leduc
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
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renegades, Maybe: A Short Story
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
Varieties of Violence
— 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
The News They Wanted Not to Hear: On Robert Stone
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.
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Thou Shalt Show: On Robert Alter’s Translation of the Hebrew Bible
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,
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The Online Pivot: California’s Cultural Institutions Adjust to the New Reality
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
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Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Malcolm X Today
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
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Dance Routines, Pandemic Routines: Ryan Heffington’s “SWEATFEST”
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
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Burying Nobodaddy: What Is “God” Even Supposed to Mean?
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
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The Mother of African Cinema: Sarah Maldoror
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
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The Politics of Pop: The Rise and Repression of Uyghur Music in China
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.”
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When Israel Was Socialist
She recognizes that she was at the time “blind” to this injustice. When writing about the Israeli inequality she began to notice, she fails, however, to mention the Palestinians or any non-Jews, focusing instead only on intra-Jewish inequality. The Israel-Palestine peace process is now effectively over, and Israel’s politics are now dominated by the right
“There Are No Angels — Only Heavy Islands”: On Claire Meuschke’s “Upend”
Meuschke’s responses to this immigration document unfold throughout the text, erasing and repurposing its language and symbols. The speaker does not reveal until the long essay “Mechanical Bull” toward the end of the collection that her father worked as a house painter in the Bay Area during the 1970s. The fan deck, which is designed
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River Phoenix: A Poem
MAY 30, 2020 LIKE SO MANY NONPROFITS AND LITERARY COMMUNITIES, MANY OF LARB’S FUNDRAISING SOURCES HAVE BEEN UPENDED. IN ORDER TO CONTINUE PROVIDING FREE COVERAGE OF THE BEST IN WRITING AND THOUGHT, WE ARE RELYING ON YOUR SUPPORT NOW MORE THAN EVER. ¤ River Phoenix In my own private Idaho I’m in bed with River
A Winner Over Time: An Interview with Martin Reiner
What do you think Blatný’s legacy in Czech culture is today? As Reiner’s work shows, however, the complexities of Blatný’s life and art are both more complicated and more fascinating. Regardless of what I wish, everyone will take from the book exactly what fits most closely to their vision of the world, to their experience
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The Art of Persuasion: On Gilberto Perez’s “The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film”
By claiming to define a “rhetoric of film,” Perez ostensibly takes the other path, attempting to define film as a rhetorical object. In short, every rhetorical object, from a billboard to an inaugural address, must be judged according to where the rhetor found their ideas, how the ideas are organized, the ways in which the