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Contemporaries Essays, How We Write (Well)

The Hesitations of Speculative History

4In July of last year, Saidiya Hartman published an article titled “The Anarchy of Colored Girls.” It was an accumulation of a style of writing and an approach to the…

Contemporaries Essays, How We Write (Well)

Set, Series, Archive, Catalogue, Litany, List

For this forum, we were asked to reflect on “how we write (well).”1 To make sure there was no evading or finessing the first person plural, we were encouraged to…

Contemporaries Essays, How We Write (Well)

RT = Endorsement

Academia is not immune to today’s breakneck pace of content generation and dispersal. I confess to feeling pulled in that direction, devoting far more of my reading during “work hours”…

Contemporaries Essays, How We Write (Well)

Introduction: How We Write (Well)

It’s become something of a platitude to say that scholarly writing is currently undergoing dramatic change. Diminishing university press budgets and the pressures of the academic job market have pushed…

Contemporaries Essays

Sex and the City: Ari, January 21

Crown Heights, Brooklyn Dear Andrea, Lakshmi, and Ned, We knew right away. None of us worked in film or television, but a draft of the script for the pilot of…

Peer Reviewed Articles

Contemporaries Essays, Critique in the Trump Era

Meta-Meta-Orwell

For almost two years, I’ve been playing a kind of intellectual solitaire I’ve dubbed the Orwell game. I check out any hot take, think piece, or news article I think…

Contemporaries Essays, Critique in the Trump Era

Print Culture and Technophilia in The Post

I swear you guys, I’ve never been so happy in all my life. The thrill of discovery; the clacking of keys; the smell of fresh ink; the warmth of a…

Contemporaries Essays, Critique in the Trump Era

Blunt Cinema in the Age of Trump

The homepage for the Trump International Hotel New York features the slogan “Subtlety is not our strength, Indulgence is.” The slogan nicely characterizes the values of the Trump era. How…

Contemporaries Essays, Critique in the Trump Era

Hall of Presidents

Niki knew better, but he couldn’t help himself. He reached over the fuzzy velvet rope to touch the president’s hand. Niki’s thin brown fingers (his nails sparkly green) contrasted with…