Indeed, the famous eclecticism of “The Waste Land,” which incorporates quotations from multiple languages and literatures, can be seen as a tribute to the educational philosophy that governed Harvard during Eliot’s time there… Yet as Crawford shows in the impressively researched Young Eliot, the “melange of topics” that Eliot explored in college “mightily enriched his poetry.” […]
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Defending Journalist Joseph Mitchell
In the April issue of the New York Review of Books Janet Malcolm wrote about the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell, and responded to Thomas Kunkel’s new Mitchell biography. The biography reveals how Mitchell invented some of his beloved material, which raises questions about larger journalistic standards, betraying readers’ trust, and what effect Mitchell’s invention and embellishment might have on […]
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‘For You is Your Religion, and For Me is My Religion’: Shorts, Sandals and Islam
I admire author Thanaa El-Naggar for staking a place for herself in her faith, despite opposition from conservative adherents and ignorant detractors.
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Slinging Sausage to English Motorists
On top of the regular flow of customers, motorway accidents would send streams of cars piling in: coaches full of school trips, families desperate to get home. A service station is not the type of place you’d expect to have regulars, but there were plenty at our Little Chef. The toast lady who came in […]
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Actress Julia Cho on Asian-American Representation, Diversity and Self-Care
It’s not news that equal representation in the media has a long way to go. As Nicole Soojung Callahan put it, “I wanted to know what this lack of representation — and the slow but (one hopes) steady ascent to better representation — looks like to someone inside the industry.”
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Does Ty Segall Ever Sleep?
Another factor zooming Segall into the here-and-now is his prodigious streak, which has been an unintentional but fortuitous adaptation to the era of social media, where music arrives and vanishes from the cultural consciousness in the space of mere days, if not hours. It’s tough to forget him, because he always has a release on […]
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Argentina’s Stolen Children
It sounds like something out of a bestselling dystopian novel, but it’s horribly real: in the 1970s, tens of thousands of so-called subversives were murdered by a despotic Argentinian government.
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Fancy Dogs and Empty Bank Accounts
How do our desires shape our identity? Poet Amanda Williams is facing this question head-on: she is a graduate student with limited finances, but all she wants is a purebred French Bulldog.
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Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up
In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race […]
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The Three Immutable Rules of Chicken Tenders
A true connoisseur of the chicken tender knows that there are three immutable rules. The first is the rule of physical integrity. A tender has a proper shape: flattish, oblong, and gradually tapering from a wide front to a narrow end. Unlike nuggets, which are largely made from processed, re-formed scraps, the chicken tender takes […]