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”…
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Contemporaries Essays, How We Write (Well)
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
Cryptographic Reading: Machine Translation, the New Criticism, and Nabokov’s Pnin
Sean Michael DiLeonardi
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Critique in the Trump Era
The Statue and the Veil: Postcritique in the Age of Trump
After the white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Donald Trump notoriously equivocated over the ethics of the protestors, claiming he was “not putting anybody on a moral plane,” as “there were…
Contemporaries Essays, Critique in the Trump Era
Trump’s Catastrophism, and the Left’s
Donald Trump is our catastrophist-in-chief. On the campaign trail, he portrayed America in crisis, a waning empire on the brink of collapse. He characterized ObamaCare as a “total disaster” and…