From the category archives:

Culture

A selection of my published work since 2001 is available here. Contact me with any specific requests.

Google’s Earth

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would

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Writers and Critics

Writing, remember, is the only art in which the creator is publicly judged by people who do precisely the same thing, but as a rule

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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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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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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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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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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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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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