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Recent U.S. tariff policies have made mundane commodities remarkably visible, with almost every week bringing news about the logistics of importing or exporting essential items, from hamburgers to cement. The results are sometimes bizarre: a recent House hearing saw the U.S. commerce secretary insist that ‘we cannot build bananas in America’, in response to a […]
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This book tells the story of mass incarceration through the eyes of the writers who lived through it. Long before Michelle Alexander characterized mass incarceration as the new Jim Crow in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in jail protesting Jim Crow in America. King did not live long enough to see the dramatic […]
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“Any judgement of MUSSOLINI will be in a measure an act of faith, it will depend on what you believe the man means, what you believe that he wants to accomplish.” — Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935). Poet Ezra Pound was a champion of the modernist literary movement, known for its clean, spare imagery […]
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Émile Zola’s Le Rêve—The Dream, in English—appeared in book form in October 1888. It was a strikingly slender novel, by Zola’s standards—the shortest of the twenty volumes that would make up his epic series about the Rougon-Macquart family (1871-93). Yet more curious was its subject: the fantasy life of one foundling Angélique Rougon, whose wayward […]
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Esperanto, Klingon, Na’vi … these are examples of invented or constructed languages (conlangs for short). Unlike ‘natural’ languages such as English, Swahili, or Navajo, which arise and change organically, conlangs are consciously created; Esperanto by Ludwik L. Zamenhof, Klingon by Marc Okrand, Na’vi by Paul Frommer. Like natural languages, many conlangs boast rich vocabularies in […]
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Reading by her window, “cross-legged, like a Turk,” Jane Eyre transports herself to “Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland.” Anywhere but Gateshead, where her life has been one of continual oppression. But the book she reads bears a surprising title: “Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds.’” What is supposedly national turns out to be immediately […]
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For anyone interested in the crucial role of money in American literature, it cannot seem anything other than eminently fitting that at the very “navel” of the vessel at the centre of the greatest of all Great American Novels sits a gold coin. Or that this totemic monetary object should speak resoundingly to questions – […]
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Why do people so often approach nature with the same kinds of rapt aesthetic and spiritual attention that they bring to works of art? Why do they seek in nature both their most unique (or “true”) personal self and at the same time a defining source of collective identity, such as the spirit of a […]
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