“Cli-Fi,” the latest portmanteau construction with which critics try to corral runaway culture (“postmodern,” e.g.), first turned up in a 2007 tweet. The coinage puts together fiction and climate, implying “climate change,” and it rhymes...
By the time Kathy Acker died, in the autumn of 1997, I was nineteen and fully under her spell, having discovered her just a few years before. Her work brought me to all sorts of feelings—lust, rage, shame, guilt, rebellion, liberation...
The subtlest feat of modern trolling ended in June 2015, when, as so often happens in America, it was taken all the way to the Supreme Court. For enthusiasts, one gratifying form of trolling involves the simple repetition of a deliberate...
With most screenwriters, the work lives well after the name is forgotten. So it is with W. R. Burnett, who is all but lost in public memory, and yet the long narrative reach of this screenwriter and forgotten novelist extends to half a...
Television may be remembered, among other things, as having entered a “golden age” even as it ceased to exist. As a term, television feels increasingly inapt, vestigial, at risk of acquiring the air quotes that presage irrelevance. Still...
For two years I’ve been walking into the tall grass to take snapshots of this field at the top of the “crooked mile,” a winding hill that leads into the shallow valley of swamp and stream in which my house stands, just past the sign that...
Perhaps poets are attracted to edges because, as Anne Carson puts it in Eros the Bittersweet, “Words…have edges. So do you,” and perhaps also because notions of the self tend to form in response to and because of those limits. Identity—what...