Winter 2009
"I would rather return to the dioramas, whose brutal and enormous magic has the power to impose on me a useful illusion. I would rather go to the theater and feast my eyes on the scenery, in which I find my dearest dreams artistically expressed and tragically concentrated. These things, because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth."
- Charles Baudelaire, from Oeuvres, via Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk
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2008 Spaced Out | |
| The past year in a scientific and political nutshell. |
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Review of Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator | |
| An impassioned, personal case for the future of the Amazon. |
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"Circus Maximus in Flux” (Philadelphia's City Planning Issues: Education, Entertainment, and Commerce) | |
| Philly faces a flood of cultural and infrastructural problems, not the least of which is a troubled economy. |
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On My Own Photography | |
| Eric Knapp develops his thoughts on photographing the people and places of New York City. |
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Review of From Sawdust to Stardust: The Biography of DeForest Kelley, Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy | |
| A fitting chronicle of a favor character actor who personified the moral core of Star Trek. |
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Move Me ‘98 | |
| Lost love washed ashore... |
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Review of Taboo Breakers: 18 Independent Films that Courted Controversy and Created a Legend | |
| In our shopworn culture of shock-cliché, where can we turn for true transgression? |
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Review of Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated Life | |
| An authoritative historical source for an enigmatic-but-loved artist. |
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Review of Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life | |
| A timely look at the massive, still perplexing shifts in contemporary capitalism over the last several years. |
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Review of The Literary in Theory | |
| Which came first: the literary or the theoretical? |
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Review of “A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections” | |
| A major exhibition on the visual aspect of Bloomsbury cultural production. |
The Modest Proposal is an electronic journal specializing in book reviews, emerging thought, and polemical essays of general interest. Direct all inquiries to the editor.
