Ocean Vuong’s new collection of poetry is a dazzling investigation of love and loss, inspiring both nostalgia and release.
Books
Book Review: “Harrow” — The Relentless Dystopia to Come
The world of Harrow is a Mad Max dystopia for intellectuals. It’s Bladerunner without the tech.
Book Review: “Hard Rain” — For Dylan Completists Only
It’s a work that shifts gears often, which is not in itself a bad idea for a book about a famed shape-shifter.
Book Review: “Work Pray Code” — Managing and Deploying Spirituality in Silicon Valley
A thorough sociologist, Carolyn Chen shows, step-by-step, how companies self-consciously appropriate religious language and rituals, creating a ‘theology’ in which work and purpose are perfectly aligned in the lives of their highest-value employees.
Television Review: Ken Burns’s “Benjamin Franklin” — Gauzy Soft-Core Patriotism
Corporate anti-racism – Bank of America is a major sponsor for the documentary – causes Ken Burns to pull his punches.
Visual Arts Commentary: Two Books and a Play — Creating Architectural Literacy
Given the current state of play, any attempts to enrich our knowledge of the built environment are valuable.
Book Review: On Our Love Affair With Catastrophe — So Long as it is Happening to Someone Else
David Thomson’s meditation on our love of disasters is engagingly allusive, reflective, humane, wide-ranging, and often funny.
Book Review: The Climate Crisis and the “Race for Tomorrow”
If there is one book to pick up that will get you interested in what is happening to our climate, Race for Tomorrow is it.
Book Review: “What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language” — Finding Multitudes of Meaning
To always be listening more and to therefore always be listening differently is of course the very nature of fandom, and to call What’s Good the work of a fan is not a putdown.
Book Review: “Mecca” — A Wonder of an American Canvas
This is an immensely complex, deeply atmospheric story of the working class, of immigrants with global origins, many who are descendants of early settlers.