reviews
Mitski’s Notes of Yearning
The liminality of Mitski’s work and its diasporic quality are related both to her mixed-race heritage and her scattered cultural upbringing....
“I was concerned for her knees”
I had been worried that “My Love Mine All Mine” was the only song some people had come to hear, just because it blew up on TikTok. ...
HE 2 SHE: Artist Pippa Garner Hacks Her Gender
Pippa Garner is a fabulous, mercurial artist with an extrasensory attunement to cultural shifts, a habit of self-mythologization, and a taste for absurdity. ...
Super Cute Please Like
Deep in the product reviews for a pair of $15 gray sweatpants, one commenter writes, bafflingly: “I love these grey sweatpants ever since i received them out of the shein package. They go with almost everything and nice and baggy on my body. The color is easy to wash and can go with coloreds and whites which is very helpful in laundry.” Below, three photos are attached. They show three different women in three different pairs of pants, none of which match the product listing.
Acid Rhythms
To uncover Detroit’s acid communist past, you have to tell its left-political history alongside its cultural history, to see how organizers and artists worked in divergent ways, at the same time and place, toward something of a shared horizon.
A Band on the Brink of Collapse
The image of musicians in a recording studio beset by interpersonal tensions—while making their best music—is so familiar it leads a listener to wonder, Is the strife all somehow necessary?...
War and Peace in Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest
In a way, our memory culture both in Germany and in Israel is an exact reversal of the reality revealed by the film. Perhaps that's why the film seems to annoy many people in Germany, who complain that it shows the "perpetrator's perspective." But memory must also be a memory of perpetration and its normalization; that is the difference between an honest memory and a convenient one....
Scholar or ideologue?
The Economist, a leading British weekly, enjoys wide global readership. It recently covered the thoughts and written work of two scholars, both Chinese, one now government-based, in Beijing and the other based in an academic institution in the US. Only the former, was branded as an “ideologue” however. Paraphrasing Professor Julius Sumner Miller: Why is Continue reading »
Forget This Book
Whether we remember them or not, the details of life still drive our lingering emotions. ...