| ( ! ) Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$media in /var/www/bookforum.com/prod/src/BookforumFrontendBundle/Controller/BlogController.php on line 161 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Call Stack | ||||
| # | Time | Memory | Function | Location |
| 1 | 0.0000 | 363800 | {main}( ) | .../app.php:0 |
| 2 | 0.0018 | 491216 | AppKernel->handle( ) | .../app.php:49 |
| 3 | 0.0049 | 1038224 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handle( ) | .../Kernel.php:201 |
| 4 | 0.0049 | 1038640 | Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handleRaw( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:80 |
| 5 | 0.0162 | 2320760 | Bookforum\FrontendBundle\Controller\BlogController->listAction( ) | .../HttpKernel.php:158 |
By playing on an all-too-human temptation to displace our hopes and fears onto celebrities and scapegoats, Murdoch’s journalism accelerates self-fulfilling prophecies of civic decay in every body politic it touches.
Charles Willeford’s Cockfighter was first obscurely released in 1962, later revised in ’72 for hardcover and excerpted in Sports Illustrated, prompting incensed reader mail about its SPCA-baiting subject matter. Now, thanks to the Brooklyn-based PictureBox, Willeford’s unsentimental and funny bloodsport drama is in print again.
Cockfighter strains to bust out of the pulp-fiction ghetto it was born into, as has Willeford’s body of work as a whole; since his death in 1988, his readership has gone up-market, from cult to academy (2001 brought a study with title Comedy After Postmodernism: Rereading
After decades of neglect, Los Angeles art history is a hot topic. The most immediate reason is "Pacific Standard Time: L.A. Art 1945-1980," an enormous collaborative venture spearheaded by the Getty Foundation and Getty Research Institute.
Recently, reading an article about the oxycodone addiction that’s sweeping the nation, I came across a sidebar about one of its victims: A respected Ohio physician who’d begun to pop a few pills himself, felt wonderful and elated for a few weeks, and ended, in short order, with a full-blown problem that led to the loss of his license, his marriage, and his house. He’s sober now, but his story is sobering: He’s working at a local rug store, barely making ends meet. And his tale—about the way unexpectedly powerful new drugs can ravage the lives not only of patients but of medical professionals—is
American comic book fans live for Wednesdays. That’s the day the new issues arrive. Every major American comic book publisher uses a single distributor, Diamond, to ship boxes of their latest releases to roughly 2,200 comics retail stores across the country. The shop owners—or their minions—put that week’s crop of Batman or X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the shelves, and then the fans arrive. A lot of them go to the same store every week, where they have a “pull list” on file, books they’ve asked to be set aside so they’ll never miss a single pulse-pounding issue. It’s a tradition.
In 2007, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, knew that he needed help. His social-network site was growing fast, but, at the age of twenty-three, he felt ill-equipped to run it. That December, he went to a Christmas party at the home of Dan Rosensweig, a Silicon Valley executive, and as he approached the house he saw someone who had been mentioned as a possible partner, Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s thirty-eight-year-old vice-president for global online sales and operations.
If we follow the logic of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, we could say that Rupert Murdoch is not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a portrait of the modern world. He is the way we live now; he is the media magnate we deserve. It is almost impossible to say a single conclusive, summing-up thing about him.
A cranky ostrich in a rumpled suit, Kurt Vonnegut might seem an odd fit for the staid Library of America. (His advice to young writers? “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”) But Vonnegut, like his hero Mark Twain, has always been something of a paradox—a beloved grouch, a man who has a bad thing to say about almost everybody but for whom no one has a cross word.
“We’re closing in on a deal,” my agent told me on the phone. “I’m just turning him upside-down now and shaking him for loose change.”
It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000. The Nasdaq, rested from its breather in the spring, was sprinting back up over 4,000 toward its March peak. Vice President Gore, demolishing the Bush son’s early lead, was pulling even in the polls. TV commercials depicted placid investors being wheeled on gurneys into operating rooms, stern-faced doctors diagnosing their patients with dire cases of money coming out the wazoo.
In the middle of his discussion of an episode of Oprah’s Book Club, Timothy Aubry pauses to wonder, “Why is the expression ‘I don’t get it’ so characteristic of the insecure middlebrow reader?” In a sense, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Readers is his book-length answer to that question. In a strange way, though, Aubry’s question reflects back on itself; we might well ask what it is about the middlebrow reader that’s been, historically, so worrisome to intellectuals. The term middlebrow itself is, for cultural luminaries from Virginia Woolf to Leslie Fiedler,
Dear Bob Dylan,
I hope this finds you well. You don't know me. My name is Rhett Miller. I make albums as a solo artist and as the front man for a band called Old 97's. I am like you, at least in that I've dedicated my postadolescent life to writing songs and singing them for folks. I write you now to pay my respects (much as you did to one of your heroes all those years ago in "Song to Woody"), to thank you for giving so much of yourself, and to ask you: What are we to do now? Here, at this late date, at the tip-top of the Tower of Babel, with all these voices shouting and so few listening,
Mathias Énard’s Zone—all 500 pages of it—consists of a single sentence. This sentence describes in unsparing detail some of the grisliest atrocities in the history of war—episodes from the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, the War on Terror, and other conflicts. While difficult to stomach, this graphic violence is anything but gratuitous. It is rather the necessary hard evidence for the novel’s astonishing meditation on war and history. Énard plumbs the depths of human cruelty to create a work of extraordinary moral gravity and literary power, a novel that deserves a place among the