Identity
Story Stream
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
Preserving Our Identity as Makers November 14, 2024
Ted Gioia, in his superb Substack “The Honest Broker,” recently verified one of the most disturbing trends in technology today: the way the presence of AI-created art and images is destroying our access to human-made art and images. Google Images, Gi...
From Guilty Pleasure to a Quality Series November 12, 2024
At first, watching the American animated series The Legend of Vox Machina was mostly a guilty pleasure. It appealed to dyed-in-the-wool nerds like myself who have a soft spot for anime, video games, fantasy, and the puerile humor of Marvel movies. Ba...
Here Comes the Champ November 08, 2024
Shadow-selves abound in Dragon’s debut story collection, The Champ is Here. As a regular contributor to the minimalist-aligned annual NOON, and taking cues from Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Charles Simic, the author specializes in prose miniatures wit...
On Montserrat Roig’s “The Time of Cherries” November 06, 2024
The Catalan writer Montserrat Roig came of age amid the normalized disorder and oppression of Francoist Spain. Born in 1946, she was part of a generation that bore the scars of a painful, brutal Civil War: a conflict of blurred lines, in which both p...
The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk November 04, 2024
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant r...
Is Academic ‘Wokeness’ in Remission? November 01, 2024
It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural ch...
Workers of the World, Divide November 01, 2024
Timothy Shenk’s new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, tries to weave together two stories and sometimes succeeds. One is about the rival careers of two of the major center-left political advisers of the past half-century, Stan Gre...
Does Anyone Really Know You? October 03, 2024
At the end of “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the less famous of the novel’s two main protagonists, muses on his isolation amid a loving family. Unlike Anna, he has a happy marriage. His wife, Kitty, and son, Mitya, bring him great joy, and he fee...
