Desire
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The Unlived Life August 06, 2024
In 2012, the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote a book called “Missing Out.” Its subtitle is “In Praise of the Unlived Life.” The paths we have not chosen, Phillips argues, are as much a part of our lives as the paths we did decide to take. Th...
Ozempic: Reshaping Desire Since 2023 May 28, 2024
A DRUG INITIALLY approved for type 2 diabetes, and now widely used for weight loss, is forcing us to grapple with the age-old question of what it means to choose freely. Weight loss drugs that work by suppressing appetite are not new. Semaglutide, be...
‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’ Is All Muscle Memory May 24, 2024
Few filmmakers have ever understood the thrill of the chase like George Miller; on the verge of his 80th birthday, he’s still going pedal to the metal, in hot pursuit of himself. Enough time has passed to confirm that, as far as pure action cinema go...
Wings of Desire May 22, 2024
There’s a popular column in New York magazine’s the Cut called Sex Diaries, which features first-person accounts by people who are having sex: rarely monogamous, often wrapped in infidelity, always salacious and intimate.As I read Anna Dorn’s third n...
Honor Levy’s My First Book & the Old Shock of the New May 16, 2024
Early in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, the socially omniscient Charles Bowen remarks of the protagonist Undine Spragg: “… she’s a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph.” Undine’s ascent via marriag...
The Sad Life of Carson McCullers May 14, 2024
The novels and stories of American writer, Carson McCullers, are populated by sad and lonely characters. They are perpetually seeking a sense of belonging, yet in some sense, they know that belonging is impossible. They remain outcasts and often meet...
Miranda July’s New Novel Will Ignite Your Group Chats May 07, 2024
There is something vague and unseeing in the gaze young women cast at older ones. Those figures paddling across the slough of middle age, headed toward the glowing shores of the golden years — the ones no longer desirable but, inconveniently, not yet...
Desire in a Postsecular Age March 01, 2024
In this month’s Q and A, managing editor Alexandra Davis interviews Luke Burgis, author of the popular Substack publication “The Luke Burgis Newsletter (formerly, ‘Anti-Mimetic’)” and the book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St...
Do You Know What You Want? February 22, 2024
According to ancient wisdom, we humans find lasting happiness only when we shrink our sense of self and its desires. When we reduce our wants, we reduce our frustrations, in this sun-whipped desert world of obstacles and lacks. Perhaps, done well, su...
The Bad Politics of Good Taste February 19, 2024
The concept of “taste” is hollow and vain. Made up of rules, codes, and biases that reduce the complexity of preference and desire to the dichotomy of good or bad, the idea imposes a hierarchy of virtue based on consumer decisions and lifestyle choic...
Polyamory Is a Luxury Belief February 15, 2024
What happens when the fantasy of getting everything you want collides with cold, hard reality? Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility attempts to answer that question by plotting the love lives of two young women: the cool-headed, pragmatic Elinor Dashw...
Martin Scorsese Wants You to Put Down Your Phone February 14, 2024
Even on Zoom, Martin Scorsese knows how to frame the shot. Ostensibly he’s dialed in to talk about his new Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, but as he’s settling in, he adjusts the iPad he’s calling from to make sure his face is framed perfectly by the ...
Vince McMahon’s Greatest Desire Might Be His Undoing February 05, 2024
Vince McMahon dreamed of becoming a respectable businessman.He had been quiet and unmemorable as a youth, had been a financial failure as a young man, and was viewed as a nepotism hire when he was coming up as an announcer at his father’s pro wrestli...
We Need More Content! February 02, 2024
I want to show you some examples of an internet phenomenon that I have been unable to unsee. The phenomenon, as I see it, has a few steps: People would like others to be convinced to take up a certain ideology. They believe that if those others saw a...
