December 27, 2018
Gentrification, the American Lie: An Interview with Stacie Williams
I met Stacie Williams a few years ago in a writing workshop I taught in Cleveland. She submitted a short story that was set in a gentrifying neighborhood, and I […]
January 31, 2016
Kanye West’s New Slave Daguerreotypes
Kanye West premiered his song and video “New Slaves” by projecting it on the exterior walls of 66 buildings throughout the world. The shots in the video have only two […]
November 4, 2015
The Principle of Inversion
If you look from a distance at our media talking about traditional religions, you find that “Hinduism” is reduced to the caste system and Hindu nationalism, “Islam” to fundamentalist or […]
March 11, 2013
The Economics of Literary Fame
This may be the nature of any widely sought desireable thing in limited supply, but in America, literary fame behaves like money. The most obvious similarity is that, like […]