From the monthly archives:

January 2010

Culture

Revisiting Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire

At once rarefied and accessible, with a singular visual style that’s impossible to carbon-date, Wings has earned its place alongside the likes of The Seventh

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Culture

24M Bachelors Condemned to Life Without a Wife

The country’s leading think-tank describes the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem facing China. The surplus of bachelors — known as

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Culture

A New Turn in Dark Tourism Comes to Haiti

Paging David Foster Wallace:

A huge Royal Caribbean liner docked 60 miles away from Haiti’s devastation in the heavily guarded resort of Labadee, and it

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Culture

Against repressive antisentimentalism

Marriage is Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell standing side by side in the closing scene of His Girl Friday, nattering on with the same jollity

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Culture

College Ivy Sprouts at a CT Prison

During her class in the prison, Professor Richards walked a fine line between energizing her students with the demands of real scholarship and scaring them

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Culture

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies

In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”

As he saw it,

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Culture

How universities should exist to make minds, not careers

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But …

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Culture

Against Camel Case

Put some distance between you and your Master Card; don’t let your Iphone make the rules. You don’t have to buy their language. It already

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