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
In This Issue...
2008 Spaced Out
The past year in a scientific and political nutshell.
Review of Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator
An impassioned, personal case for the future of the Amazon.
"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.
On My Own Photography
Eric Knapp develops his thoughts on photographing the people and places of New York City.
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.
Move Me ‘98
Lost love washed ashore...
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?
Review of Salvador Dalí: An Illustrated Life
An authoritative historical source for an enigmatic-but-loved artist.
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.
Review of The Literary in Theory
Which came first: the literary or the theoretical?
Review of “A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections”
A major exhibition on the visual aspect of Bloomsbury cultural production.
