& I need your help! When I was in high school I spent just hours upon hours trying to suss out gay subtext in novels, songs, poetry. I longed for that moment of recognition: the moment when you realize that someone else has put into words and images something you have felt but never understood. It was so frustrating when somebody would slur through a pronoun (is that, “Was a lover, and his last”?) or skitter away from a revealing... Read more
Powerful. Via IP. Read more
for AmCon: The first room of the Neue Galerie’s “Russian Modernism: Cross-Currents of German and Russian Art, 1907 – 1917” (on view through August 24), takes us back to a vanished world. This is a world of silk stockings and fiacres, cavalry officers, and the Woman Question: the modern world. It’s a cosmopolitan world, alive to the distortions of human perception, and an international world in which Russian artists looked West and Western artists looked to Africa for inspiration. It... Read more
overlooks the obvious explanation: This tree growing 40 different types of fruit—including varieties of peaches, plums, apricots, and almonds—may look like something plucked straight from the imagination, but it’s very real. And this is how it was made. witchcraft (gorgeous photo though!!) Read more
“Obama’s Economics Team Is Taking on One of America’s Most Underrated Economic Problems”: Occupational licensing rules, which require government approval (typically by a state government) before a person can practice a given profession, are one of the most under-discussed aspects of the American labor market. A new report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that the way licensing is applied in practice often leads to higher prices, reduced opportunity, and more macroeconomic fragility. Regulating entry into certain kinds... Read more
When I asked people to recommend books about life in religious communities, this (as well as Godden’s In This House of Brede) was one of the most frequent responses. It’s a story set among the Dominican Sisters of Bethany, whose charism involves prison ministry–and so many of the sisters are themselves former criminals, what we’d call “ex-offenders” or “returning citizens.” These are I think the same nuns you see in Robert Bresson’s terrific nun-noir The Angels of Sin. (This is... Read more
I forget where I found this: im putting together a couple of scottish folk mixes bc that’s what i do and im honestly curious if anyone in my country has ever been unequivocally happy about anything ever scottish trad music genres: Everyone I Love Is Dead The English Have Stolen All My Sheep You Want To Be My Boyfriend? First You Must Answer These Riddles Three The Protestants Have Stolen All My Sheep I Love You A Lot But You’ve... Read more
on the meaning of the Planned Parenthood videos: IN an essay in his 1976 collection, “Mortal Lessons,” the physician Richard Selzer describes a strange suburban scene. People go outside in the morning in his neighborhood, after the garbage trucks have passed, and find “a foreignness upon the pavement,” a softness underfoot. Looking down, Selzer first thinks he sees oversize baby birds, then rubber baby dolls, until the realization comes that the street is littered with the tiny, naked, all-too-human bodies... Read more
for AmCon: “There will never be an American AbFab.” This was the first thought in my mind as I left the theater after seeing “Trainwreck,” the new Judd Apatow/Amy Schumer moralizing romcom. The movie seems to think that it’s the story of a bad girl who triumphs over adversity and gets her man. It’s actually the story of a basically nice girl with major daddy issues, who learns and teaches a few heartwarming lessons on her journey toward somewhat delayed... Read more
alerts us: …Like Paglia, Castle’s entrée into the literary tradition of sexual inversion was a teenage fascination with Oscar Wilde—she dreamed of being “male, dandified, and in some sort of filial relationship to various 1890s Decadents.” Unlike Paglia, her grown-up persona is less flamboyant, more Jamesian. Indeed, the two ladies juxtaposed remind me a little of Wilde and Henry James circa Guy Domville: Wilde the crowd-pleaser reigns supreme over the London stage, for now; James, no less of a genius,... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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