As disco, house, and techno emerged from queer communities of color in deindustrializing New York, Chicago, and Detroit, these genres of electronic dance music occupied an aesthetic status that paralleled…
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Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: An Ode to the Audiobook
What we experience as audiobooks today originated in the UK in the 1920s as the talking book. Back then the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) tested different ways…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
The Cartoonist as Entrepreneur: Rob Liefeld, Image Comics, and the Art of the Creator-Owner
Spike Lee: Rob, have you had any formal art training? Rob Liefeld: No, just a lot of imagination. — Levi’s 501 Button Fly Commercial (1991) I. In the second episode…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
Quality Is Just Another Word
One spring afternoon while in quarantine, I ended up watching NBC’s Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87) on Hulu. I watched because of the mythical status of Hill Street Blues in…
Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
The 7 Neoliberal Arts, or: Art in the Age of Mass High Culture
The neoliberal period has seen myriad new and formerly marginalized cultural forms aspire to the status of art. Over the last half century, quality television, graphic novels, avant-garde video games,…
Contemporaries Essays, Slow Burn: Quarantine Edition
Exodus: Tetzaveh: Pratima, August 11
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Tetzaveh Exodus 27:20 – 30:10 New Haven, CT Dear readers, Across the south Indian state of Kerala, Hindu devotees often bring lamps…
Contemporaries Essays
Exodus: Terumah: Carina, August 11
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Terumah Exodus 25:1 – 27:19 New York, NY Dear People of the Book, I can’t keep track of Moses and it’s making…
Contemporaries Essays, Interviews
“Who Gets to Speak in Our Intellectual Traditions?” – An Interview with Edgar Garcia
Edgar Garcia’s Signs of the Americas (University of Chicago, 2020) ranges across disciplines in pursuit of a startling thesis: Nonalphabetic sign systems, such as petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and even the still-undecoded Incan knot-writing…
Contemporaries Essays, Slow Burn: Quarantine Edition
Exodus: Yitro: Jacob, June 23
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.” —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and…
Contemporaries Essays
Exodus: Mishpatim: Sarah, June 23
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Mishpatim Exodus 21 – 24 Brooklyn, NY Dear fellow subjects of the law, As I confessed in the introduction to this series,…