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Diary: Barry Yourgrau, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Chronicler of mess
An anthropologist and archivist of populist “low” culture—a radically open-hearted and democratic but acutely discerning advocate, preservationist, and…
Review: Jesse Donaldson on Foxfire’s Appalachia
Revisiting our post on the political uses of nostalgia
Review: Irena Grudzińska Gross on Displaced Persons
Several million displaced East Europeans were resettled at the end of World War II. How did that happen?
Guest Notebook: Roland Allen on the Birth of the Notebook
How the humble notebook greased the wheels of learning and literature
Review: Yasmine El Rashidi on Sonallah Ibrahim & Ahmed Naji
An Arabic literary convention of the literary diary both rings with the present and speaks from the past
Review: J. S. Marcus on a new history of postwar Germany
Making the case that nothing really ever settled down in this part of Europe after 1945, which was marked by wave after wave of dislocation and…
Diary: Ian Frazier, Trotsky in the Bronx
Electric lights, gas range, bath, telephone, elevator, even a chute for the garbage: the Trotskys were impressed with the Bronx
6
Review: David Alff on the Port of Los Angeles
LA’s port was an ambivalent achievement: a triumph of applied science, an ecological crime, a sublime public work promising collective uplift, and an…
2
Diary: Pedro Lemebel, Two Scenes of Resistance
Here and there, in disguise or on the down-low, actors, painters, poets, and political groups would meet up after curfew to plan acts of sedition…
Review: David Alff on road ecology
The word “crossing” refers both to the act of meeting another’s path and the place where that happens. In our vehicularized modernity, crossings have…
Review: Julia Preston on an epic account of Central American immigration
A new book considers the consequences that US foreign policy in three small countries has had on immigration and social dynamics here
1
Review: John Banville on James Marcus’s Emerson
There is something in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life and work that speaks directly to the troubled heart. Certainly he had troubles enough of his own…
4
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