Micah Mattix

Speaking of art and reproduction, having probably just read Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters or one of André Breton’s surrealist manifestos, eighteen-year-old German Helene Hegemann has written a book on “Berlin’s club scene” incorporating large . . . . Continue Reading »

Martin Amis and Anna Ford are “having a go of it,” as they say. It all started with Amis’s complaint in The Guardian that newspapers make him out to be more controversial than he is . Ford, a longtime friend, responds with an open letter accusing him of narcissism and an . . . . Continue Reading »

The Giro d’Italia—the second most important stage race in cycling after the Tour de France—is starting in Amsterdam this year, and a politician from the left-wing GroenLinks party has suggested that instead of having podium girls kiss victorious cyclists “podium guys” . . . . Continue Reading »

That John Updike wrote poems as well as novels is news to few people who follow contemporary poetry. Before his death, a common view of Updike’s poetry was that it was light, entertaining stuff that he wrote to refresh himself after the serious work of fiction. After his death, however, a number of critics have hailed it as the elephant in the room of contemporary American poetry… . Continue Reading »

For all of you Walker Percy fans (and I am one of them), be on the lookout for the new Walker Percy documentary by Winston Riley. Mr. Riley’s previous documentary—on the artist Walter Anderson—won a number of awards and was broadcast on PBS. According to Mr. Riley, the Percy film is . . . . Continue Reading »

Taking his cue from Wallace Stevens who said that poetry is the “supreme fiction,” Al Gore, as you may know, has published a climate change poem in his new book, Our Choice . The first stanza is actually not too bad, but it falls apart quicker than an arctic iceberg after that, alas. . . . . Continue Reading »

In the November 17th issue of The Christian Century , Miroslav Volf reveals that he was one of the experts consulted by Yale University Press in The Cartoons That Shook the World fiasco and explains why he recommended that the press not reprint the Danish images. Doing so, Volf writes, . . . would . . . . Continue Reading »

Having just received my own review copy of A New Literary History of America from Harvard University Press, I was intrigued to read Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Ward’s email exchange on the book over at The Chronicle of Higher Education . Unsurprisingly, the book does not just focus on . . . . Continue Reading »

In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education , Xenia Markowitt, director of the Center for Women and Gender at Dartmouth College, answers the question: “Is It My Job to Teach the Revolution?” (Subscription required. The full article, however, is also available at . . . . Continue Reading »

The above tagline is from the new “Futurisms” blog over at The New Atlantis . If you haven’t had the chance to check it out, I highly recommend you do. The blog engages techies who reduce human cognition to the material processes of the brain and who hope to harness technology to . . . . Continue Reading »