Since the turn of the twentieth century, admission into America’s most elite colleges has always been a straightforward matter of selling out. The days when pure wit garnered fresh high school graduates passage into the academic aristocracy have faded like an aged daguerreotype. Our places of higher learning say ...

Almost four years ago I attended a symposium featuring rapper Talib Kweli that focused on hip-hop’s responsibility to the community at large. What sticks out in my mind is a joke told by Mr. Talib (lyrics stick to your ribs). When asked about his thoughts on Cam’ron’s ...

You: Hey
You: How’s it going?
You: Oh...that’s your penis.
> You disconnected.

The following was adapted from an excerpt of a Word document that may one day, by the grace of David Simon and the Holy Ghost, become a thesis. Amen.

Nature, God, or whatever you want to call the creator of the universe comes through the microscope clearly and strongly. Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification—crude, rough, and unsymmetrical. But in nature, every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more ...

My lovely girlfriend.

I remember being told as a kid that whales could speak to one another from across the planet. They could do this by singing in a very deep voice whose immense vibrations were strong enough to push past the deep ocean currents. No ordinary fish could hear them, because they ...

There are, I believe, four ways to approach the new film, “The Fourth Kind.” These four approaches are derived from J. Allen Hynek’s system of classification for alien encounters. According to Hynek, THE FIRST KIND is the sighting of a UFO (unidentified flying object). THE SECOND KIND refers to ...

Every day on the way to school, I saw
A BIG RUBBER COCK;

In the Fall of 1930, Soviet architect Andrei Konstantinovich Burov was part of a team assembled by Moscow to visit Detroit’s state-of-the-art factories and to establish links with America’s leading industrialists. What follows are excerpts from his letters to his wife Irina, in which he describes his American ...

Now that it’s October and this year’s parade of “Oscar hopefuls” is in motion, the time has come to ask the question: What were this summer’s movies—collectively—all about?

Morton Feldman was, it could be fairly said, the twentieth century’s most talkative composer.

To say that art in our society has taken on religious connotations is not to say anything shocking or new. Nietzsche presaged this transposition of religious fervor from church to museum as early as 1878 when he wrote in Human, All Too Human that “art raises its head where religions decline.” Nietzsche wrote this, of course, without any knowledge of the film industry that was about to burst onto the Western cultural landscape.

Dear Video Art,

I hope things have been going well for you since the breakup. I’ve been doing my thing – a little oil painting, some yoga classes, you know. Trying to find myself and regain my center after all of that turmoil. And I just had to write, because there are some things I need to get off of my chest before I can get closure, and you know we were never good on the phone. I just feel like I spent all of this time trying to understand and appreciate you, what makes you unique and special, and it would be a mistake to throw that beautiful friendship away, you know?

When browsing classic disco blogs—always maintained by sweaty, foreign men, a tendency I have learned from the pictures of themselves they publish inexplicably—one can only judge the quality of the records by their album covers. There are no band biographies, no album reviews, no other photographs: it is a cultural archive without history or salesmanship. Determining quality with so little information is a delicate but logical process, the mechanics of which can only be explained by example.