Longreads

I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning…

A bill co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin and GOP Sen. John McCain — included in the pending defense authorization bill — is predictably on its way to passage. It is triggering…

If you’re on the internet and attending to content, you probably know that earlier this fall, Facebook launched several major changes in the way it collects, organizes, and displays…

With the release of Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House, weve been thinking about women writers who dont just push the envelope, but rip it apart to make…

Lev Manovich WHAT IS DIGITAL CINEMA? Cinema, the Art of the Index[1] Thus far, most discussions of cinema in the digital age have focused on the possibilities of interactive narrative. It is not…

This post is the seventh of seven posts about the future. Caveat lector. A story to round it off Every morning I wake up in my house in Vishaka and walk via the aloo poori stall on Shyamji…

Luc Sante is a writer best known for his exciting and evocative rendition of the roiling early years of New York in Low Life, illuminating the lives of the hucksters and swindlers who…

I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books. Magazines, though, were called books, but only one magazine ever came into the house, a now-long-gone photographic general-interest weekly commandingly named Look. Words in this household were not often brought into play. There were no discussions that I can remember, no occasions when language was called for at length or in bulk.

When Tim Leary called and asked if I’d pick up Genesis P‑Orridge on my way down from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I knew enough to be afraid—but not a hell of a lot more. As founder of industrial music pioneer Throbbing Gristle and cult-inspiring acid-house follow-up Psychic TV, P‑Orridge was known for soliciting mail-in pubic hair and semen samples from his fans, tattooing his wife’s labia, and staging mock abortions on video. When those tapes were interpreted by clueless police as real satanic murder rituals, it became impossible for Genesis and his family to return to England without danger of imprisonment.