politics August 05, 2015

Will the Real American Psycho Please Stand Up: Why Donald Trump Was Patrick Bateman’s Hero

Recently, I had cause to reread Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 bestseller American Psycho. A lot has been said about this controversial comic novel’s violence, but I think it's best classified with social satire like Vile Bodies or Speedboat (just with, you know, a homicidal narrator). And as it turns out, despite its twenty-four years, some of American Psycho’s social satire is very timely, particularly one running story line: Patrick Bateman is obsessed with Donald Trump. I had completely forgotten this, and upon revisiting the book, it dominated my reading experience. Here, as in real life, Trump

culture June 30, 2015

"Force Majeure," Karl Ove Knausgaard, and the Disease of Manhood

Sweden has produced two of the most powerful contemporary renderings of manhood as a disease, as a sickness that contaminates the nuclear family. Force Majeure, directed by Ruben Ostund, addressed the modern family and its masculine saboteurs more directly than any other film last year. And then of course there's My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard's epic inventory of one man's failures as a husband and a father.

At a party recently, I overheard someone in his twenties talking about how much he enjoyed a television show called The Fall because it made him think about how “being a man is its own kind of disease.” People of both genders nodded in a sympathetic way. If this is a moment when young people seek out opportunities for misandry, there are plenty of occasions to do so; even pulp entertainments like Game of Thrones and Mad Max: Fury Road put men at the center not to assert male power but to invite us to squirm at its failure. But if you’re looking for contemporary renderings of manhood as a disease,

culture February 12, 2015

Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

In one of the more bizarre stretches of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, the guards who have been presiding over Slahi’s three-year detainment give him the nickname Pillow and inform him that they’d like to be called something from the Star Wars movies.

In one of the more bizarre stretches of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary, the guards who have been presiding over Slahi's three-year detainment at Gitmo give him the nickname Pillow and inform him that, in turn, they'd like to be called something from the Star Wars movies. The US government has redacted the Star Wars handle his captors wanted Slahi to use when addressing them, but he says it means "the Good Guys." Perhaps they wanted to be called "the Jedi," the Zen warrior protagonists in the George Lucas mega-franchise; it's even more amusing to imagine that they wanted Slahi to call

Dan Duray