Posts by Swedan Margen
The End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post
There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent. There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like The Drift and The Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines…
Read MoreThe Movie That Inspired Gregory Bovino to Join Border Patrol
For all the scenes of jeeps raising dust in the desert and migrants wading through the Rio Grande, “The Border” is something of a two-hander. Charlie’s prevailing disgust with his fellow-officers, most of whom all but openly take part in a human-trafficking operation, is sharpened when a young migrant from Mexico, named Maria, has her…
Read More‘Ass power!’ Hundreds gather in L.A. to play a video game about donkeys and the resistance
The donkeys are pissed off. Put upon, out of work and victims of decades-long systemic abuse, it’s time, they have decided, to protest. The donkeys, metaphorically, are us. At least that’s the premise of “asses.masses,” a video game played by and for a live audience. It’s theater for the post-Twitch age, performance art for those…
Read MoreTrial starts in L.A. lawsuit alleging Instagram and YouTube knew apps harmed kids
A landmark civil trial that will ask jurors to decide whether social media companies can be held liable for pushing a product that they allegedly knew was harmful to children began Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, with attorneys sparring for more than four hours in combative opening arguments. The closely watched test case…
Read MoreEmerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Is Extravagantly Superficial
Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution of the characters’ deep bond, from steadfast sibling affection toward a combative, quasi-incestuous desire. Catherine, incensed by Heathcliff’s treatment of her, slips several eggs into his bed; it’s a childish prank with an erotic undertone,…
Read MorePierre Huyghe’s A.I. Art Monster Takes Over a Night Club in Berlin
In the far corner of the Halle, there’s a dim glow. Your job, you realize, is to grope your way toward that light, which reveals itself to be a projector beam hitting a colossal screen, almost nine hundred square feet. This is the centerpiece of “Liminals”: a fifty-minute film on loop. A few other tweaks…
Read MoreIn an Age of Science, Tennyson Grappled with an Unsettling New World
While the earth thus trembled, different and equally disruptive discoveries were happening in the sky. Thanks in part to improvements in telescope design, astronomers began identifying thousands of nebulae and star clusters, in essence making the universe suddenly larger in the same way that advances in geology had made the earth suddenly older. Meanwhile, some…
Read More“Industry” Is a Study in Wasted Youths
In the new season of the hit HBO series, its young protagonists have left the trading floor that made them. Their second acts are revealing. Source link
Read MoreListening to Joe Rogan
Long John Nebel and Art Bell are gone, but the tradition they embodied has a prominent inheritor. In an age of diminishing attention spans, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is free-form, runs around three hours, and can feel like the old midnight sprawl reborn online. It’s the most popular podcast in the world, and there are…
Read MoreBarry Blitt’s “Split Screen”
In February, 1925, the first issue of The New Yorker was published, featuring a drawing by the art editor Rea Irvin of a top-hatted dandy examining a butterfly through his monocle. This dandy—later named Eustace Tilley—has made an appearance on the cover virtually every February since and, in the process, has become one of the…
Read MoreWhy We Can’t Stop Reading—and Writing—Food Diaries
Spending a day in someone’s kitchen can tell us about their relationship to time, money, pleasure, and place. Source link
Read MoreThe Race to Give Every Child a Toy
Actually, they did want to be. There is a reason Morris Michtom moved his family from the Lower East Side to the row houses of Brooklyn as soon as he could. (When his youngest son was born, in the back of his Tompkins Avenue candy store, he named him Benjamin Franklin; he might as well…
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