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…
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Contemporaries Essays, The 7 Neoliberal Arts
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,…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
Conversations with Friends about Normal People
I read Conversations with Friends alone and loved it; reading Normal People with friends was an unrelieved frustration. I’d picked it for a book club soon after finishing Sally Rooney’s…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
Race and Romantic Realism
Midway through Sally Rooney’s Normal People, we encounter this conversation among friends: At the table they’re talking about their day trip to Venice…. Marianne tells Connell he would like the…
Contemporaries Essays, Reading Sally Rooney
Wet Newspaper
Getting punched went with the territory. Between adolescence and adulthood, I got hit hard a couple of times a year. One day, I walked through the doors of my school…