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What’s Happening to Reading?
What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing industry,...
Apocalypse No: “The Life of Chuck” Stumbles at the Finish Line
It’s impossible to discuss “The Life of Chuck” without revealing the ending, because that’s where the movie starts. It’s built backward, as is the Stephen King novella on which...
So You Want to Be a Genius
Let’s say there’s another pandemic. This time, a lethal disease spreads through contact with other people’s fecal matter. Precision toilet cleaning becomes a matter of life and death. In...
Why Donald Trump Is Obsessed with a President from the Gilded Age
Late in his life, McKinley reconsidered protectionism. He was reëlected in 1900, and by his second Administration he felt that the United States should greet globalization by entering foreign...
The Atomic Bombs’ Forgotten Korean Victims
Tanaka Terumi was thirteen years old when the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, in August, 1945. The blast knocked him unconscious. After he came to, he...
Cactus Wren Is Doing Its Own Thing
The space is bright and open, with high ceilings and large windows that highlight the eternally terrific people-watching of the Lower East Side. The mint corner location is the...
Play It Again, Charles Burnett
One of Burnett’s earliest cinematographic efforts is the silent short “69 Pickup,” written and directed by Penick. Two Black men pick up a white woman hitchhiking on the boulevard....
Reëxamining Victimhood in Guatemala
While Corzo was working on the book, he learned that Walter Barahona, the brother of one of the gang’s leaders, José Luis Barahona, was being held in a prison...