A decade ago, Sudhir Venkatesh inspired the insular world of academic sociology with American Project, his closely observed ethnography of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Venkatesh’s hard-fought insider access was hugely impressive: As he labored for years in the sprawling public-housing project, Venkatesh took participant observation to new heights, documenting the complex social networks that governed life in the Taylor homes.
Among the course offerings announced by the University of Michigan in the fall of 2000 was an undergraduate English seminar titled “How to Be Gay.” Led by professor David M. Halperin, a well-known figure in queer studies, the class proposed to examine the Lavender Canon in all its mincing flamboyance: Judy and Liza, opera and Broadway, divas and drag, muscle queens and Mommie Dearest. “Are there,” Halperin asked, “a number of classically ‘gay’ works such that, despite changing tastes and generations, ALL gay men, of whatever class, race, or ethnicity, need to know them, in order to be gay?” Oooh
As I sit down to write, it’s roughly day 3 of the Washington political class’s overheated response to the release of Mark Leibovich’s This Town, and day 800 or so of what that class regards as the real story: the chatterbox narrative surrounding Mark Leibovich’s This Town. Politico has come forward with its latest report on the surveillance data it’s been collecting on all things “Leibo,” as the rag calls him. Glancing over the dispatch, it’s clear that the crucial question on Washington’s mind is this: Will this saboteur—who has courted no end of damning disclosures from his sources via
From the beginning of the South Asian crisis that culminated in the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, argues Gary J. Bass in this impressively researched book about a “forgotten genocide,” the major responsibility for what happened falls on two men—Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. While the president and national-security adviser directly collaborated in the secret bombing that touched off another genocide in Cambodia, the Bangladeshi crisis was more a study in conventional Cold War intrigues and personal piques than the Cambodia bombing had been—one reason, perhaps, that the full details of the US response are only now coming to light.
IN 1983, ARTIST SOPHIE CALLE found an address book on a Paris street. Before returning it, she photocopied its contents, called the people listed, and asked to interview them about the book’s owner, whom she calls Pierre D. “I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him,” she writes. Calle’s pursuit struck […]
Singer and guitarist Chuck Brown invented go-go music in mid-’70s Washington, DC; it was an infectious blend of funk, Latin rhythms, and audience call-and-response that became the sound of African-American DC for decades. By the time of Brown’s death in May at age seventy-five, he had become the undisputed godfather of the genre, and a civic icon, even though go-go never found much of an audience outside the capital city. At Brown’s funeral, DC Council chairman Kwame Brown (no relation) began his eulogy in a defiant tone. “I am go-go,” he declared. “To the media, you better get that right.
IF YOU DRIVE ACROSS the US or even anywhere outside the I-95 corridor, you discover that country music dominates the airwaves. New Mexico, Maine, or Montana—regardless of region, the radio twangs in tones redolent of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. Country music is without a doubt this country’s music. Its cultural associations—the clothes, attitudes, and politics—also hold […]
Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002. It goes by several names and takes a range of forms, but as with so many protean phenomena, we know it when we see it. Participation-based art, social engagement, social practice: Art that takes relations between people as its medium is currently ascendant, with specialized MFA programs, new […]
Seven years ago, trying to decide between two book topics, I was spending half my time interviewing magicians and going to magic shows and the other half interviewing shoplifters and going to shoplifting-addiction groups. But then came a moment when I began to wonder whether magic was a good subject for me: I was sitting with a magician—white and middle-aged, like so many are—in a coffee shop on the Upper East Side. When I asked how he had done a card trick in a show I had seen the previous night, he glared at me for a long moment. I
John Baldessari with plaque from Cremation Project, 1970. Trying to make art creates a host of problems. One of the best ways of handling these, as John Baldessari seems to have realized in the mid-1960s, is to let the problems be someone else’s. Then art becomes like the news. “I just read it and laugh,” […]
Not long ago I had a very foolish dream. I was sitting alone in a house when the phone began to ring in another room, a room in which my girlfriend, in turn, was asleep. I didn’t get to it before she awoke and answered it, annoyed, and of course it was for me. The woman on the line said something about something that needed to be done right away, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. She seemed to know me and expected me to know her, and it all seemed quite serious, but I simply
On page 102 of The Center Holds, former Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter’s account of the 2012 election (and his second book about the presidency of Barack Obama), we learn that the president was facing a problem as his 2012 “reelect” approached: Liberals didn’t particularly care what happened to him. “Reenergizing the base was tough,” Alter writes. Fortunately, however, Obama got an assist in this task from right-wing governors such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio, whose wars on public-employee unions and their pensions “proved to be powerful motivators for the base.” Clever Obama campaign people noticed
When the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments over the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act this past February, pundits and reporters used an all-but-obligatory set of phrases to describe the legislation. They characterized the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as a “landmark” and the “crown jewel” of the civil rights era, and noted that it still represents the “high-water mark” for both civil rights and voting rights. Yet in some sense, all the lofty rhetoric has come to obscure the real story of one of the Johnson administration’s signal achievements. The Voting Rights Act is now
There are only two truly revealing sentences in Zev Chafets’s new biography of Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News and message minder for a host of Republican presidents. They serve as bookends of sorts. The first, in the preface, informs us that the project at hand will be superannuated: “He intends to write an autobiography someday, and I imagine he is holding something in reserve.” The second appears 249 pages later, in the acknowledgments: “I am indebted to Brian Lewis, Fox News executive vice president for corporate communications, who was always willing to answer just one more question.”
After living in China for more than a decade, what struck Peter Hessler most upon returning to the US was the way Americans talk. The Chinese “aren’t natural storytellers—they are often deeply modest, and they dislike being at the center of attention.” The Chinese conversational style suits Hessler, whose trademark reporting method could be dubbed Extreme Patience: When he finds a new place, he likes to settle in for what most people would consider an unreasonably long time. At one point in Strange Stones, Hessler’s meticulous, deep-dive collection of essays from China and beyond, he refers offhandedly to the “three
“People expect too much of writers,” Albert Camus lamented in the late 1950s. At the time Camus was writing, the Algerian rebellion had grown into a full-scale guerrilla war for independence, and while his initial sympathy for the uprising led the French Right and the French Algerian settlers to denounce him as a traitor, he also came in for frequent polemical attacks from the French Left for not energetically and unequivocally supporting the insurgents. Criticism also came from the Algerian militants themselves. Frantz Fanon, the best-known Algerian writer, derided him as a “sweet sister.” Sartre, formerly his close friend, mocked
There is no such thing as “the Internet.”
Fifty years ago, one of the great truths that no serious person dared challenge was that humanity was just a few ticks away from the detonation of what Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich dubbed “the population bomb,” in his book of the same name. The world, everyone assumed, would be awash in (even more) hungry mouths to feed.
Hope Against Hope takes place in a New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, but even more prominent in journalist Sarah Carr’s story is a highly unnatural disaster: American poverty. The daily lives of many New Orleans schoolchildren, before and after Katrina, amount to an ongoing state of emergency, one that can make the stable, orderly enterprise of learning close to impossible. Kids must get up at 5AM so mothers can get to low-wage jobs. Teens get shot, or watch their friends die.
In the gushing, breathless copy that justifies Gavin Newsom’s lead spot in his publisher’s catalogue, we learn that “government cannot keep functioning in a twentieth-century mindset.” We are informed further that Newsom, the present lieutenant governor of California, and formerly the youngest mayor of San Francisco in more than a century, came to his tirelessly sanguine view of digital democracy by overseeing the digital renovation of San Francisco’s city hall. In a flourish as logical as it is grammatical, we learn that “Newsom’s quest to modernize one of America’s most modern cities—and the amazing results he achieves—form the backbone of
