Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark

David Cronenberg’s films often probe the porous qualities of identity.

Bookmark

Paul Soulellis: Your recent work takes the form of animated GIF collages that convulse with explosions, weird animals and jerky gestures—scenes that are usually playful but often perverse. Most of it…

Bookmark

The revival of the animated GIF marks a point in the history of the web when it finally became sufficiently advanced to take pleasure in its own obsolescence.

Bookmark

Peter Suchin reappraises the prismatic works of Roland Barthes – an author who defied his own pronouncement of the designation’s demise. From the Marxist of Mythologies to the ‘scientist’ of S/Z,…

Bookmark

This is what a New Yorker article has to say on the subject of “Moral Machines”: “An all-powerful computer that was programmed to maximize human pleasure, for example, might consign us…

Bookmark

Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can…

Bookmark

My new book Shock Value: How a few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, explores how horror went mainstream by revisiting the golden age that began…

Bookmark

Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority of…

Bookmark

Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical…

Bookmark

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends,…

Bookmark

Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we can…

Bookmark

It is possible that we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. Where did that resistance come from? Judging from his new…

Bookmark

David Cronenberg’s films often probe the porous qualities of identity.

Bookmark

Paul Soulellis: Your recent work takes the form of animated GIF collages that convulse with explosions, weird animals and jerky gestures—scenes that are usually playful but often perverse. Most of it…

Bookmark

Peter Suchin reappraises the prismatic works of Roland Barthes – an author who defied his own pronouncement of the designation’s demise. From the Marxist of Mythologies to the ‘scientist’ of S/Z,…

Bookmark

How do you make a library live online? On a recent tour of the Folger Shakespeare Library, here in Washington, DC, I had the pleasure of seeing, in person, one of…

Bookmark

Sushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can…

Bookmark

Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority of…

Bookmark

What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music…

Bookmark

Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical…

Bookmark

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends,…

Bookmark

Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we can…

Bookmark

The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for…

Bookmark

It is possible that we have a kind of built-in moral resistance to the runaway pathologies now visible in the arts. Where did that resistance come from? Judging from his new…