When I visited the Woody Allen papers before winter break, the allegations against Mr. Allen of sexual abuse had not yet resurfaced. Those accusations, presented by his daughter Dylan Farrow in the New York Times on February 1, have reignited an age-old debate about the relationship between an artist’s personal life and the content of his artwork.
It’s time for a game of “Hot or Not.” Rompers: Hot or Not? Two-finger rings: Hot or Not? Denim button-down shirts: Hot or Not? Boyfriend jeans: Hot or Not? Recently I surveyed a friend’s closet and found the above articles … Read More
There’s nothing here to live up to the beauty of “Do You Realize??” or the songcraft of The Soft Bulletin, instead, the Flaming Lips are dancing – and the tracks are as compulsively danceable as ever – yet in more openly dark territory. From the provocative opener’s “If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich/ Would you do it?” to the anger of “Haven’t Got a Clue,” “Every time you state your case/ The more I want to punch your face,” there’s nothing like the optimistic reservation expressed earlier, it’s been supplanted by the gloomy question, “How do we keep going on?”
Five months ago, I fell in love with a nine-year-old boy. His name was Oskar Schell, and he was cheeky, and he was perceptive, and he was caring, and he wrote to Steven Hawking thinking he would get a personal response, and he was a pacifist, and he was in an incredible amount of pain. I knew I loved him when he said, “Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place…Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you’re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone would be safe…”
If anybody has ever seen _Wet Hot American Summer_, then ze knows what my camp and most other non-specialized camps are like. Sleepaway camp is a hyper-sexualized environment in which children are encouraged to explore their sexuality beyond the leering … Read More
The incest taboo is something anthropologists have grappled with for ages. Besides the negative biological consequences of mating with your close relative, there seems to be a need for a differentiation of social roles of familial relations and lovers. Getting … Read More
On March 25, Jason Bell—Columbia University freshman, gastronome-in-training, and editor of the _Columbia Spectator_’s “Food & Drink” section—published a scathing review of Coliccio & Sons…
First Exhibit. Here is the July 1, 1933 issue of Das Neue Tagebuch, a newspaper for German exiles in Paris. We read of a Jewish dentist, Maier, who was forced into poverty through a ban on Jewish practitioners. In mid-July, with his wife (also a dentist) on a quick vacation, Maier clandestinely worked in her office, but was later kidnapped by four S.A. men during lunch at his own apartment. According to the report Schwarzschild received, the men had stabbed Maier twenty-one times, broken his feet by crushing them with a copying press, and shot him in the head, causing his skull to explode.
The album titles I want to highlight here earn my praise not as a result of vitality in any traditional musical- or thematic-unification, but because, they’re just pleasing somehow—they make me raise a bemused eyebrow, and then giggle like a schoolgirl. Is this not reason enough to crown a king?