When Cornel West speaks, his body seems to perform its own kind of abstract reasoning. The gestures imply an inductive process that stands in relation to what he is saying but that is untethered by mere words. His signature gesticulation … Read More
The most vexing thing, for me, as an admirer, is that he chose to hang himself, a gesture he had to have known was deeply dramatic, in the tradition of Brilliant Suicidal Writers like Woolf and Hemingway.
Before you roll your eyes—surprise! another starry-eyed undergrad paean to Barack Obama!—I’ll have you know that here at the Nass we’re not in the business of writing portentous presidential endorsements, as is the wont of our esteemed colleagues over at … Read More
JuicyCampus, an anonymous forum devoted to gossip and rumor, has taken off in recent weeks on college campuses across the nation, and represents what is perhaps the final stage of the digitization of student identity. Where before individuals controlled the level of disclosure contained in and the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of their online façades, now anyone may say anything about anyone.
As an exercise, imagine the entire Facebook network as a real world, in some temporal place. In this world, the human being is replaced by the personal homepage of Facebook; in place of bodily organs and anatomical processes are substituted “about me” sections and a wall for public posts.
Since the advent of the internet, the intimacy that we feel with our pop songs has changed. When content is so utterly customizable, taste is automatically effected; musical taste can now be articulated in a broad spectral slate of enumerations—the … Read More