Alex Sayf Cummings's Blog, page 15
August 28, 2020
Consider the Trick Mirror: The Ambivalent Mea Culpa in Contemporary Discourse
When does the act of acknowledging your own complicity in an unjust system start to look like an empty gesture? Aaron Colton considers the work of Jia Tolentino.
August 26, 2020
Booksmart, Late-Capitalist, Bougie and Banal: Sally Rooney’s Normal People
Inexplicably acclaimed, Rooney's novel offers canned millennial gender play with a scrawny garnish of warmed-over Marxism.
August 22, 2020
Your Earwhig Is Truly Magnificent, Sir
Like discovering free verse, punk rock, or Prince, Guided by Voices offered the awesome realization that you could literally do whatever the fuck you want and it might actually be good.
August 21, 2020
How a Film Flop from 1991 Explains 2020
Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders's doomed epic, was shockingly prescient about America's equally doomed 21st century.
August 17, 2020
Dispatches from Fresno, 1918-19: Following the ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic in Real Time, Part XVIII
The second wave of the virus seemed to be ebbing in January 1919, but health authorities warned Fresnans not to let their guard down.
August 12, 2020
Teaching During the Pandemic
Historian Joshua Freeman discusses the strange and poignant experience of teaching his final semester under the pall of COVID.
August 10, 2020
A Year of Snow Days
After the Lost Weekend of Spring 2020, American teachers, students, and parents look ahead to a period of prolonged and agonizing uncertainty.
August 9, 2020
A Screaming Comes Across the Sky: Re-Reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
Writer Murray Browne looks back on Pynchon's novel, once heralded by critics as "bonecrushingly dense," in light of the age of Qanon.
August 4, 2020
Defund the NCAA: The Potential Role of Athletic Activism in Reforming College Sports
College athletes could accomplish decades worth of activism in far less time because the NCAA has never been more vulnerable than it is at this moment in history.
July 29, 2020
Dispatches from Fresno, 1918-19: Following the ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic in Real Time, Part XVII
In the days following the Board of Health’s collective resignation, Fresno mayor William F. Toomey…
