Near the end of my 25-year marriage to poetry, a friend jokingly called my books “stocking stuffers.” That was when I stopped questioning what I could do to make poetry more relevant and entertaining and […]
Culture - Media - Technology
Posted on:
Reverse-Engineering the Nerd Oligarchy
The other day I was watching Bill Maher’s Club Random, and the guest was tech millionaire and anti-aging geek Bryan Johnson. Part of the conversation was about the apparatus that Johnson wears on his penis […]
Class - Consumerism - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Liberty: Tied, Beaten and Blown
Awhile ago I was flipping through the New Yorker and saw an interesting cartoon: two men in uniform, guns trained on a pedestrian, behind them a van with “Fashion Security” on the side. The caption […]
Class - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Class War? Not Yet
On the October 14, 2005 Diane Rehm Show “Friday News Roundup,” David Corn of The Nation complained that the Administration’s policy to rebuild New Orleans as a tourist town would permanently exclude many of the […]
Academia - Culture - Literature - Poetry
Posted on:
High-tech Poetry Bitch
They had big dictums, deep erudition and cunning linguistics. Marianne Moore translated La Fontaine’s easygoing French into an English of conspicuous difficulty. In Pound’s hands the rudimentary Italian of the troubadours and bare-bones Chinese of […]
Art - Culture - Politics
Posted on:
Where’s the Culture?
Activism is now like poetry or philosophy. Few people take it seriously. These days the activist, like the poet or philosopher, has no public. And as the poet and philosopher have lost their power to […]