In a filmmaking era when movies are increasingly designed, focus-tested, and audience-approved to please, “Bone Tomahawk” is strangely refreshing for refusing us our simple pleasures.
In a similar way, the most troubling thing about Sarah Palin is not that she lies. The problem is that she is not qualified, and in the very real event that John McCain would either pass or suffer a disease of old age during his presidency, like, say, Ronald Reagan may have, she would become the leader of the free world. So I wonder: why do the Republicans care so much about winning that they would actually put their country at such significant risk?
Nearly every object in the Princeton University Chapel has been given in someone’s memory. Names of dead Princetonians are etched on the backs of pews, on plaques at the bases of statues, on the very stones that form the Chapel … Read More
The President of Italy and his three friends, a Duke, a Magistrate and a Bishop, sit at the head of a table surrounded by teenage SS officers, a few older women, and about twenty young boys and girls. Some of the youths are dressed in suits and dresses, others in their underwear, while still others sit naked. A nude girl emerges from the kitchen with a large tray of steaming shit…
~and~
There is a neighborhood on the outskirts of a city with a lousy bar and grimy brick buildings and orange lamps in the alleys. There are towns where in the deep hours of night cars prowl the streets full of dumb menace. Vague criminals and edgy losers grope at women dressed in cheap finery and the sex is drunken and ugly and brief…
Dear Readers, We’re proud of this issue and it’s all for you—our lovely, even-keeled readers—and so we hope you like it too. Please feel free to browse at your leisure, or, if you’re not in the mood to do that, … Read More
It seemed like any other night at the movies. To the left I spotted the requisite young couple on their first date alternating between watching previews and attempting awkward conversation. Down in front lounged the raucous band of teenagers brazenly … Read More
I want to tell you about this year; I want to tell you about what’s happened. I want to tell you about what went down in “Gossip Girl” and about what’s real and what’s fake, about how time passes in Princeton, about what mattered.
Your fate is sealed, as the planets wrote your story by the stars and universes that predate you. So, go on. Enjoy the feast of your destiny. Let the winds guide you home. Listen, for the following will detail … Read More
“Tangled Up in Blue” is not Bob Dylan’s most convoluted song; “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” with its references to eleven-dollar bills and hanging around in ink wells, probably wins that title. It is not even the most confusing ballad on Blood on the Tracks; Wendy Lesser is right on in her analysis of “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts”: “There are these huge gaps…what [Dylan] leaves out is more interesting in some ways than what he puts in.”
The increasing frequency and surprising breadth of product recalls in recent memory—spanning decapitating child seats, exploding laptop batteries, self-strangling cribs, fecal spinach, undeclared peanut butter cup candies in “Homestyle” ice cream, lead-laden Chinese Barbies, and “My First Kenmore” Play Stoves with “tip-over hazard”—makes it easy to forget or overlook the actual societal machinery that whirs into action whenever and only if a mass-consumed product is recalled.
