occasionally subtle
trying on a metaphor
Show & Tell
Kaledo Art
we're not kids anymore.
Kiana Khansmith
blake kathryn
No title available
oozey mess
@theartofmadeline
hello vonnie
almost home
Janaina Medeiros
tumblr dot com
No title available
Keni
Sweet Seals For You, Always
taylor price
Not today Justin
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@yesplasmapool
Resenting Man's Desire to Cry
Nine years after the fact, says Jesse David Fox, we can see that Zach Braff's Garden State "was good enough to define the things that we come to hate in certain movies (and certain characters and people)"—and that, at least for the most part, we've retroactively "confused its influence for cliché."
What Happened to Ezra Klein?
Peter Frase in Jacobin on the naïveté and/or disingenuousness of policy-wonkery, "an appealing way to give one’s prejudices a fact-like veneer."
Hunting for False Negatives
"Money should not be wasted on futile preventive programs to detect mental health problems that don't yet exist," says Allen Frances of Psychiatric Times on President Obama's sole politically-viable proposal post-Newtown. "Instead, resources should be invested where there is desperate need—to properly treat and decently house psychiatric patients who are now shamefully neglected."
The Banality of Evil, or Nora Ephron on Small Breasts
Esquire's Stephen Marche, in an astounding piece of bullshit that manages to be both self-indulgently myopic and profoundly unselfconscious, "argues" (J.K. Rowling is richer than the queen! Famous authors are famous!) that today's whiny writers of literature and literary nonfiction are enjoying a "golden age."
This Is Big Talk
Evgeny Morozov reviews Gavin Newsom's disappointingly naive tract on substituting Silicon Valley capitalism for the hard work of thinking: "After all, if we can make our own cheese, knit our own sweaters, and homeschool our children by having them watch TED talks for days on end, why bother with those pesky public institutions?"
The Failed Ventriloquist
James Wood says that while Tom Wolfe "is not wrong about those horses in Zola," his prefab "realism" amounts to details "scooped up off the sidewalk" and fails the demands of his own manifesto.
All That Knowledge Is Gone Now
Joshua Rothman laments the demise of Google Reader, which "felt like filling up a bookcase. It was a place for organizing your knowledge, and also for stating, and reviewing, your intentions and commitments. It kept a record of the things you meant to read but never did; of the writers you loved but don’t anymore."
The Inconvenient Elder
Both Pope Francis and his saintly namesake are contextually kind and humble—today's tends to modern-day lepers and takes the bus to work—but our new Francis's vision is less radical, less loving, and likely less relevant than his choice of name implies.
Only the Thing He Thinks He Thinks
W.H. Auden reluctantly extols Sigmund Freud, whose dangerous method understands that "psychological events are not natural events but historical" and "stands for treating everyone as a unique and morally responsible person, not as a keyboard."
Blood and Information Quickly
University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has resigned from the National Academy of Sciences last week citing objections to its electing a scientistic cultural imperialist, University of Missouri Professor Napoleon Chagnon, to its ranks.
Take Care of Freedom
Outgoing MLA President Michael Bérubé looks at the humanities and "can't avoid the conclusion that the value of the work we do, and the way we theorize value, simply isn't valued by very many people."
Ain't Working
"Stressing austerity, as part of a determination to get the public finances under control, is a cheapish way of exerting some agency." John Lanchester on Britain's counterproductive, feel-good stabs at deficit reduction.
STEM Yields?
Stanford University is working hard to prove that the humanities are objectively useful and vocationally manageable. But are these laudable goals?
Den of Thieves
The morally-bereft Chamber of Commerce of Portland, Maine, worries that the city's homeless shelters both function too well and aren't profitable enough.
None of These Are Don Gately’s Terms
Lee Konstantinou, Elaine Blair, and Christian Lorentzen on D.T. Max's Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Wallace's final book of essays.
Mommy Dearest
A trenchant and important reply to Liza Long's much-fêted but ill-considered "I am Adam Lanza's Mother": "We gave credence to this post precisely because it told us that some people are inhuman, broken from birth, bad, and therefore unknowable."
From Behind
"We walk around with a well-worn romantic idea of sex as a kind of overwhelming, animalistic force that possesses us and leads us to action, whether we like it or not. But of course sexual desire can also, in the crucial moment, fail to overwhelm us, and in our world this is really the more urgent, anxiety-provoking, and lonely situation." Elaine Blair reviews Lena Dunham's Girls.