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Alejandra Campoverdi grew up with her immigrant mother, aunts, and grandparents, in a crowded Santa Monica apartment with fashion-magazine cutouts on bedroom walls. Her outfits gestured toward the status to which she aspired. She wore a plaid uniform skirt to what is now Saint Monica Preparatory, the Catholic school she attended thanks to financial aid …
Evangelista stands out among Meisel’s cast of characters in part because she’s so perfectly, elegantly blasé, whether there’s a scalpel slicing into her thigh or a bandage wrapping her head. Talking with William Norwich in “Linda” ’s chatty introduction, she says she can often anticipate Meisel’s adjustments and mood shifts. Like all great models, Evangelista …
Linda Evangelista and the Canny Eye of Steven Meisel Read More »
In your story from this week’s issue, “Heart,” the narrator’s family suffers from a hereditary disease passed down from his woodworking ancestor, in which tiny wood shavings perforate the heart. What was the inspiration for this disease? When my mother was younger, she did many types of factory work. On production lines, she would pull …
“Chloe liked Olivia.” When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in “A Room of One’s Own,” her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future—that of queer literary criticism. “Do not start. Do not blush,” Woolf cautioned her audience. (The published text of “A Room of …
In the age of climate change, “natural disaster” is more of a misnomer than ever. We can absolve ourselves of responsibility for volcanic eruptions and earthquakes (except the ones caused by fracking). But the lengthening hurricane season, the floods, and the droughts? They’ve got our fingerprints all over them. Higher average temperatures and drier vegetation …
In 2019, the literary magazine NOON published a story by Lydia Davis called “The Language of Armagnac,” a quietly comic meditation on the difficulties of translating “the patois of the city of Auch, which is a local form of the language of Gascon, which is in turn a dialect language of Occitan.” A second version …
Last summer, when the release of the video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a single by the country-music star Jason Aldean, generated a small storm of controversy, it was mentioned, often as an aside, that Aldean had been onstage on October 1, 2017, at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, in Las Vegas. That …
On December 15, 1811, the London Statesman issued a warning about the state of the stocking industry in Nottingham. Twenty thousand textile workers had lost their jobs because of the incursion of automated machinery. Knitting machines known as lace frames allowed one employee to do the work of many without the skill set usually required. …
Cicero, the Roman orator and politician of the first century B.C.E., spoke up over and over again—while stamping his feet for effect in between sentences, if his own testimony is to be believed—for the republic: that is, for a form of democratic government, perhaps limited, but unambiguously opposed to tyranny or boss-man rule. Supplying the …
To Fix Democracy, First Figure Out What’s Broken Read More »
Spark was not much of a magazine. Handwritten and mimeographed secretly with a primitive machine at a sulfuric-acid plant in a remote region of central China, the publication began in 1960 and never went beyond two issues. The first was hardly more than a poem and a few articles, critical of Mao Zedong’s ongoing Great …
How China’s Underground Historians Fight the Politics of Amnesia Read More »
