In rendering Natalie Portman's character, and her pleasure, so obviously deformed, the film makes her into a particularly monstrous figurehead for an ever wider cultural impulse to psychologize every aberrance, to assign exacting, demystifying vocabulary to all the ways in which a person can be hurt.

Available responses to constraint (boxes)

1. Reject the structure and rebuild. 

2. Contort the structure, make the hinges creak. 

Either might include building smaller new boxes inside the old box.

Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton.

Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics.

Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.

We must go beyond the tired narratives of cultural exploitation or commercial gentrification that tend to dominate discourse.

The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies

When Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received.

I thought it would be a fun exercise, as a means of assessing this activity over these last few months, to assign Pokemon types to each piece we published.

The beauty Thomas and Spradlin identify in this city is not the architectural grandeur funded by steel robber barons, or city-sanctioned ‘aerosol art,’ but the interplay of the wall and the graffiti; the law and rejection of the law; the memorial and the refusal to pay homage to a memory.

Evans’ FBI file is held in a federal facility hundreds of miles from Cleveland, and digitized scans of its components are not available online, making it difficult for the city’s residents to discover for themselves the scope of illegal surveillance their community faced.

We are creatures of reference, engaged in private dialogue with the countless dead, blursed to imitate in small ways and in large our own personal Jesus.

The three looked at the king like, wait, what the heck are you saying, and then they were given seven days to deliver the very heck in question: a real container for awe.

Our ideas and definitions of awe are in many ways about an experience of something “greater” than humanness; something to be fearful of. I don’t know that I have experienced actual awe. I’m also not sure I believe that it is something to seek.

People will think what they think of Detroit. Some will take the time to explore, to hear the joyful voices and music and birdsong that twist through its streets. Some will never give it a chance.

To feel joined in a collective that knows how personal and heartbreaking a cultural betrayal can be, and to share the feeling of being met where one is, at odds with surrendering, disappointed it isn’t another way.

A kind of reading that doesn’t just describe what happened in a story, but actually performs it. The only way to read the story is to play it, and the only way to play the story is to do it, to completely embody it.

Awe is a kind of surprise that resists pity or cynicism. It is not relative or subjective. It’s an active and dynamic process that cannot be separated from its twin concept, wonder.

I am taken by the unique vibration his work strikes deep in my organs, how different these internal resonances are from how DeLillo is regularly discussed in the contemporary landscape—how his work makes me feel, to be blunt about it.

I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.)