print December 2013

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Novels were the first television shows, and Sergio De La Pava doesn’t forget it. This past summer, I read all 690 pages of A Naked Singularity (University of Chicago Press, 2012) in two days, the way that tens of thousands of Americans watched a whole season of Breaking Bad or Orange Is the New Black on Netflix. The suspense was episodic; the characters not “flawed” but jagged, uneasily memorable; the throughline a high-wire moralism plus boxing allegory that makes this putative Crime and Punishment update feel more like David Foster Wallace off drugs. Not once did I begrudge my commitment. I

film November 22, 2013

Teenage Riot

1. HIGH SCHOOL IS NOT LIKE WAR. College admissions and the job market are not like war. A reality show is not like war, and neither is love. When books and movies made for teens are recast, by critics, as allegories for teenage life, you know it’s the grown-ups who can’t hack the world as it is. What are The Hunger Games books, and now movies, really about? Exactly what it looks like: war.

2. As The Hunger Games (2012) opened in theaters across a post-Occupied, pre–Obama ’12 nation, we wanted to talk its politics. Those to the left saw the systematic impoverishment of the Districts by the Capitol

slant October 24, 2013

Sein und Zit

THIS WEEKEND IN LYON there was a streaker. For two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday, a man whose stage name is Monico Chiquito wandered the biennial wearing black briefs and Asics and using his iPhone to post selfies to Instagram, Vine, and more. These photos were published on disembodiedselfie.tumblr.com and on the New Museum’s website, where from 7 to 9 AM EST you could also watch a livestream of the photos occurring—“performance art,” by the non-present artist Xavier Cha. Since I wouldn’t open a stall door in a public bathroom, find someone shitting or masturbating, and leave the

film August 05, 2013

Skin Deep

HERE IS A WOMAN who rode liberation to the top, becoming the first porn star in America, gigantically famous, beloved by Hugh Hefner and Johnny Carson alike, a lover of Sammy Davis Jr.’s, author of two best-selling autobiographies, and later, rose with the second wave as the nation’s number-one babe against pornography, friend of Gloria Steinem, author of two more best-selling autobiographies, both utterly and believably contra the first two, and yet—nobody looks at Linda Lovelace and thinks, “Now she was smart.”

A new biopic feels unlikely to change that. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey

diary July 12, 2013

Money, Cash, Picassos

IN 1998 it was a “Hard Knock Life” and I was thirteen, living in small-time suburban Canada, and that song was the first I’d heard of Jay-Z. I loved that music video and most of the rap and R&B videos I saw in high school, graduating with “Bonnie and Clyde,” and I wanted (without trying at all) to look like the girls in them. Mariah was my favorite, in “Heartbreaker,” when Jay drove a Benz and made millions. Now he drives a Maybach halfway to a billion. That part even my dad could have predicted, you know? But if you’d told me at thirteen that all a skinny suburban-Ontario white girl had to do