Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts

On The Subject of Murder

May 9, 2013
By
On The Subject of Murder

From the Introduction 

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer

by Lisa Downing:

“Serial killers are so glamorized . . . as to tempt other to . . . revere them as the prophets of risk and individual action, in a society overwhelmed and bogged down by the dull courtiers and ass-kissers of celebrity culture.”—(Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus, 2001)

“ share certain characteristics of the artist; they know they are unlike other men, they experience drives and tensions that alienate them from the rest of society, they possess the courage to satisfy these drives in defiance of society. But while the artist releases his tensions in an act of imaginative creation, the Outsider–criminal releases his in an act of violence.”—(Colin Wilson, Order of Assassins, 1976)

“Jack the Ripper, along with many of his followers, has achieved legendary status. Such men have become world famous, awesomely regarded cultural figures. They are more than remembered; they are immortalized. Typically, though, their victims, the uncounted women who have been terrorized, mutilated, and murdered are rendered profoundly nameless.”—(Jane Caputi, The Age of . . .

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The Trials of an Editor

May 8, 2013
By
The Trials of an Editor

We greet the spring with an annual rite, neither more nor less essential than the other invocations that usher in the season (woodpecker outside my window foxing with overzealous, semester’s-end induced sleep; big-leaved magnolia blossoms littering the street like well-boutonnièred toilet-paper folk art and norteño/Baby Bash productions looping over and under some dude’s fancy for the J. Geils Band). With this rite—the announcement of the recipient of any particular year’s Laing Prize—we drum up the legacy of Gordon J. Laing, former general editor of the University of Chicago Press. In February 1925, the same month that saw the New Yorker publish its first issue, Laing penned a satirical piece about university publishing for the in-house newsletter Press Impressions. Stravinsky strings on, and we reproduce it in its entirety below:

***

The Trials of an Editor

Some Experiences of the Man Intrusted with the Preparation of Manuscript for Our Publication

By Gordon J. Laing, General Editor

From Press Impressions, Volume 2, Number 5, February 1925

The editor of Press Impressions gave me the title of this article and I have let it stand. The fact, however, is . . .

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Before We Loved the Buddha by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

May 7, 2013
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Before We Loved the Buddha by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Before We Loved the Buddha

by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

***

According to a famous Chinese legend, in 60 CE (or thereabout), the Emperor Ming of China had a dream. He dreamed that he saw a golden man flying through the sky, rays of light streaming from his head. The next day, he summoned his ministers to interpret the dream. They told him that the golden man was a sage from the west called the Buddha. The emperor immediately dispatched a delegation to find this sage. After a long journey, they returned with a scripture and a statue. And this is how Buddhism first came to China.

In 1603, the famous Catholic missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, published a book, in Chinese, in which he explained that the golden man the emperor saw in his dream was not the Buddha; he was Jesus. If the emperor’s envoys had gone farther west, they would have arrived in the Holy Land, and would have returned with the Gospels. Bringing Buddhism to China had all been a terrible mistake.

Among the “founders” of the world religions—Abraham, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad—perhaps the best loved (or at . . .

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Hack: Our free ebook for May

May 6, 2013
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Hack: Our free ebook for May

One of the taglines—the pithy paragraph-end to an initial piece of copy—for Dmitry Samarov’s Hack goes something like this: “And from behind the wheel of his taxi, Samarov has seen more of Chicago than most Chicagoans will hope to experience in a lifetime.” True words, Y/N?

I’d argue, “partially.” Part of what makes Hack such an appealing read is that its characters—the back-seat inhabitants of Samarov’s daily commutes through Chicago and its environs—are immediately recognizable as the kind of fully formed Greek chorus that shuffles and barks its way through contemporary urban life. But what makes them memorable isn’t just that easy familiarity. It’s the combination of Samarov’s prose and illustrations (many made from inside the cab) and how they perform a sleight of hand with our most basic Nelson Algren-ism: “Lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives.”

In Hack, these characters aren’t so much lost-on-the-verge-of-a-breakthrough as they are lost to the time and place of Chicago, inescapably caught up in strawberry-shake vomiting laps past McDonald’s drive-thrus and Marie’s Riptide Lounge; shapeshifting into an audience for tiny yapping lapdogs and overstuffed luggage stationed outside of . . .

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Our Fountains of Youth: An excerpt from The Longevity Seekers

April 25, 2013
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Our Fountains of Youth: An excerpt from The Longevity Seekers

The Longevity Seekers: Science, Business, and the Fountain of Youth by Ted Anton

The tale of the fountain of youth is a mythic encounter that dates back to Herodotus, which has enraptured would-be seekers for two-thousand-years and counting. In The Longevity Seekers, science writer Ted Anton updates the search and takes readers inside a story of contemporary bioscience that began with worms and branched out to snare innovative minds from California to Crete, investments from big biotech, and endorsements from TV personalities like Oprah and Dr. Oz. Below follows an excerpt from the book’s preface, which invites its reader to “explore the relation of a unique science of its time and, in so doing, the relation of any science to any time.”

***

The Laboratory of Molecular Biology sat at the end of Hills Road on the southern edge of Cambridge, England. In 1983 the weather had been so miserable that twenty-nine-year-old Cynthia Kenyon taped a yellow sun on her single window overlooking distant hedgerows and a lone traffic light. She was checking her experiments in her tiny three feet of bench space in a room in one of . . .

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Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, translated by Anne Carson

April 19, 2013
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Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, translated by Anne Carson

Iphigenia among the Taurians by Euripides (newly translated by Anne Carson)

From the Introduction:

The date of this play is uncertain, but approximately 414 BCE is a fairly safe guess.

The story involves two important variants on the legend of the House of Atreus: the transportation of Iphigenia to the Tauric Chersonese on the northern coast of the Black Sea to serve as a priestess of Artemis; and the last wanderings of Orestes, which unite him with his lost sister. These variants are clearly explained in the text, at lines 1–41 and 940–78, respectively.

Iphigenia among the Taurians is technically a tragedy, that is, a serious play in elevated poetical language presented on the occasion when tragedies were produced. But in the modern sense of the term it is not “tragic.” It has often been called “romantic comedy,” of a type also exemplified in Euripides’ Helen, his Ion, and many lost plays by various Greek dramatists. It is not merely a matter of the happy ending. Other tragedies have that. But here the emphasis is, even more than usually, on plot, on the how rather than the why . . .

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“One of the Fine Arts” by Roger Grenier

March 29, 2013
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“One of the Fine Arts” by Roger Grenier

“One of the Fine Arts” by Roger Grenier, from A Box of Photographs (2013, translated by Alice Kaplan)

After the war, the street photographers came back to the city. On the boulevard Saint-Michel, like just about everywhere in the world, they took pictures of the passers-by and handed them a ticket. If you wanted to, you could return later, show your ticket, and pick up your portrait on the front of a postcard. Every time it happened to me, I thought about Panaït Istrati, the Romanian vagabond whose stories I loved for their savage hymns to freedom. He practiced his art in Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais.

I had a new camera. To replace the Voigtländer, I bought an old Rolleicord on sale (actually, my mother bought it when someone came into her shop and offered to sell it). So I remained faithful to the model of the poor man’s Rollei. But I’d become a journalist and little did I know that my job would force me to give up photography for years, because of union regulations. Reporters were not allowed to take photos. We used to travel as a . . .

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Martha Nussbaum on Julius Caesar and political love

March 28, 2013
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Martha Nussbaum on Julius Caesar and political love

An excerpt from “‘Romans, Countrymen, and Lovers’: Political Love and the Rule of Law in Julius Caesar,” in Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions

Julius Caesar shows us two different kinds of political love, in tragic opposition. Brutus is principled, but he is not cold. He loves the institutions of the Roman Republic, and he tells us that this abstract love has driven out his personal love of Caesar, as fire drives out fire. He appeals to the emotions he believes all Romans have for their threatened republican form of government. Addressing them as “countrymen and lovers” (3.2.13), he summons them to love of country and hatred of oppression. Suspicious of any particularistic attachment, Brutus prefers emotions resolutely fixed on an abstract object, which reason can justify and commend. He expects all Romans to be like him: deliberative citizens, who value liberty with both their judgment and their hearts.

Brutus’s antitype is Antony, who can understand no kind of love other than the personal, who cannot refrain from calling the dead man “Julius” even in the presence of the conspirators, and whose “Oh, . . .

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Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York

February 25, 2013
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Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York

In 1979, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio founded their longtime interdisciplinary design studio and collaborative architectural practice, which would eventually become (with the addition of Charles Renfro in 1997) Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Their “project-based” interventions (air quotes to emphasize the unpredictability and aplomb with which they deconstruct, resurrect, and alter the confines of conceptual inquiries into space and place), honored with a MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1999, have included everything from the High Line—an urban redesign of a former elevated railroad spur— and streaming new media to the focused construction of contemporary art museums and a stretched-canopy entranceway to the tents of New York Fashion Week.

Edward Dimendberg’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images is the first comprehensive inquiry into their varied cultural works, and it carefully traces their evolving forms alongside their relationship to earlier modernist practitioners. This past week, the book launched in accompaniment with a discussion involving the architects at New York’s Storefront for Art + Architecture. Included here are some candid snapshots that capture the conversation (as well as the packed house). More on the book can be found here.

. . .

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Sandra M. Gustafson on the State of the Union (2013)

February 21, 2013
By
Sandra M. Gustafson on the State of the Union (2013)

‘The hard, often frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government’

In the first State of the Union Address of his second term, President Barack Obama echoed themes from past speeches, most recently his Second Inaugural Address delivered a few weeks ago and his victory speech from election night. A central theme—arguably the central theme—of all these addresses and many previous ones has been the need for the nation’s elected officials to work together to solve lingering problems caused by two wars and a major economic crisis. The president opened his fifth State of the Union Address with a quotation drawn from John F. Kennedy, who along with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., is his favorite source. Kennedy opened his second inaugural address by urging Congress to remember that, “the Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress.”  And so President Obama once again urged the representatives of the rival parties in Congress to work together to pass legislation to stimulate the economy, improve education, and reduce gun violence.

He continued to quote from Kennedy’s second inaugural: “‘It is my task,’ said, ‘to report the State of the Union—to improve . . .

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