“All in all, I’m a dumb bastard… If you’ve got to, you’ve got to.” Thus criminal Michel Poiccard opens in a voice-over in Jean-Luc Godard’s classic 1960 film À bout de soufflé (Breathless). Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) looks up from a … Read More
Last night Tahrir Square was a lawless place—masked young men roved, accosted, helped, threatened, fought; buildings loomed, burnt and crumbling, paving stones were absent, having been broken up and used as ammunition against the police a few months ago. But perhaps this experience only applied to Tahrir at 2 a.m. So I returned that afternoon to take photos of ongoing protests and developments. Daylight better illuminated the debris of Tahrir’s damaged past, but also cleared the fog of tension from eleven hours prior.
Every year I try to watch the films nominated for the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Last week, I saw one of these, Philomena, starring Judy Dench and Steve Coogan and directed by Stephen Frears. The film is about Philomena Lee (Dench), an old Irish woman who is searching for the son that the Catholic Church forced her to give into adoption fifty years prior.
George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, KG, GCSI, GCIE, PC was a man few of us can afford to forget. Besides keeping the bloody Russians out of India, he wore a metal corset to combat a spinal injury … Read More
I spent this past week in the basement of Friend, in a windowless computer cluster, working on a lab report for Chemical Engineering. Pizza came in and Excel spreadsheets came out-a perfect mass and momentum balance. I happened to notice … Read More
Lord Byron wrote, “I’ll publish right or wrong. Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.” Keep this in mind, eh? When duly elected politicians set to work making a safer nation for my family and me, it is … Read More
“If corporate feminism is the end of feminism, then it is the end of a movement that has been ending for generations—and continues to thrive, most indebted to its harshest critics.”
‘Reading,’ as describing a certain activity of eye-sliding-over-page, with eye recognizing ink blobs corresponding (by means of whatever neural calculus) either (1) to something like second-order phonemes, and therefore to certain aural centers and therefore to speech-parts of the brain, which ‘articulate’ meaning to other parts, or (2) to something like second-order morphemes, and therefore to certain visual centers, and therefore to picture-parts of the brains, which ‘project’ meanings to other parts, or (3) to some combination of (1) and (2)[1]—well, ignore that or bracket it, because I have 1,000 words and a little over, say, ten minutes to argue for long and arduous works of literature, their import and glory—and, specifically, for the particularly long and particularly arduous recent novels of Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace.
On the seventieth anniversary of Ataturk’s death I was in the mountains between Van and Diyarbakir with a baby on my lap and her three year old brother stretched out on the seat behind me while their mother tried to sleep, the silk scarf slipping from her hair.
Daily, we take for granted something revolutionary: we can instantaneously update thousands of people on any information we desire to share. Inherent in that great power, however, is the even greater risk of potential embarrassment, ranging anywhere from awkward tweenage photos to your creepy uncle commenting on every status.