I must’ve been eight or nine the one time my dad took me along to meet Bart. This was somewhere near Tompkins Square Park. What I recalled was a shaggy shock of blue hair, and feelings of both elation and terror: On the one hand thrilled to be old enough to be taken along one night to the city to meet a guy with blue hair, and on the other frightened of the jagged dark in the Alphabet City of the late '80s. In my memory Bart looked like Warhol, but maybe that was just part of the dream pedigree I had for my dad, the one that looked to White and Genet and not "Will & Grace." But I did think that my dad once said he’d gone with Bart to sell drugs to Allen Ginsberg, so maybe in this case my retrospective fantasy — that if he’d had a secret life, it could at least have been an exciting one, something worth escaping his surface life for — was accurate. I remembered hearing for the first time about AIDS, and I remembered my dad walking around for some months, maybe years, as though accompanied by ghosts. It was selfish and obscene for me to look back and want his secrets, the secrets I’d come here to try to clear up, to have hidden amazing things: It meant I have at best ignored and at worst aestheticized the fact of what must have been unimaginable pain. Like any gay man of his age, he’d watched a great number of his close friends die of AIDS, but unlike many of those men, he was not able to talk about it to the people closest to him, the people he lived with. Maybe the reason he liked "Will & Grace" and not so much White and Genet — though, now that I think of it, I did give him "The Married Man" once and he told me it was the best novel he’d ever read — was that all he wants now is to be normal and happy. He wanted to marry Brett and drink boxed wine and take Yoshi out for walks and watch "Mamma Mia!" until their DVD player caught fire. I myself had never been less than loathsome on the subject of "Mamma Mia!" and I felt terrible about it, but I didn’t want to digress into overemphatic apology, and I would stand by my derision of "Mamma Mia!"Continue Reading...

Amanda Palmer (leaving out her middle name, which is a story for another day) didn’t used to be a superstar. She is now. Her Kickstarter project is instantly oversubscribed. Her concerts sell out, wherever she goes in the world, and she goes everywhere. Her Twitter account has more than half a million followers. Classic overnight [...]

Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the li...

Has a non-fiction book ever changed your mind? For me, it has happened literally dozens of times. Books have changed the way I think about sales, evolution, marketing, governance, interpersonal relationships, mindfulness, the invention of the Western world, government power and more. Next question: How far into the book did you get before your mind [...]

Over three decades, Alison Bechdel's comics have grown increasingly intimate. Her alt-weekly strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," was as emotionally true as it was funny and shrewd, but as with other great political cartoons of the era, like "Bloom County" and "Doonesbury," the travails of its cast -- a gay-community ensemble whose lives Bechdel chronicled from the Reagan era through the first anxious decade of a new century -- only hinted at the life of the artist herself.Her own personality burst out more explicitly in 2006 with the appearance of "Fun Home," a masterful graphic memoir about her relationship with her clever, exacting and very closeted father, who taught school and ran a funeral home simultaneously, and whose death under mysterious circumstances raised the possibility of suicide. Critics justly heaped acclaim on "Fun Home," praising its intricate narrative architecture and honest, despairing voice. In reconstructing her path from girlhood to womanhood, from nervous young diarist to nervous young artist, Bechdel overturned many of her family's myths, and a host of broader cultural ones.Continue Reading...

When people use the term "rhetoric" these days, they usually mean empty language -- be it high-flown or spoken in high dudgeon. A few may think of rhetoric as a deadly classical discipline devoted to the exhaustive parsing and labeling of figures of speech: zeugma, anyone? Yet as Sam Leith points out in his delightful and illuminating "Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama," we live in the most rhetorical era in human history, surrounded by and embroiled in argument, enticement, invective and panegyric wherever we turn.The Greeks and Romans studied and scrutinized rhetoric so intently because they understood it to be the very stuff of power, specifically the power of persuasion -- which, as Leith points out, is even more potent today than it was in the fourth century BC, when Aristotle produced the first treatise on the subject. The master's "Rhetoric" is a work which (unlike much of his scientific writing) remains as useful today as it did in ancient Athens; Leith sprinkles shrewd tips from it (such as, construct your argument so that your audience thinks it's their own idea) throughout his book. "He was the first person," Leith writes of Aristotle, "really to grasp that the study of rhetoric is the study of humanity itself."Continue Reading...

The greatest strategic challenge facing ExxonMobil Corp., the largest oil company in the world not owned by a state, is access to new oil reserves. Resource nationalism – the inclination of many Middle Eastern and other post-colonial governments to control their own oil – has locked the corporation out of many oil opportunities. This has led ExxonMobil to riskier political frontiers in Africa and Asia, countries where the government is too weak or corrupt to produce its own oil. Also, in these states, oil and gas production exacerbates internal conflicts and incites guerrilla armies because controlling an oil or gas field can be a ticket to sudden wealth.When Exxon and Mobil merged in 2000, Exxon inherited a number of Mobil properties in conflict zones – in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Indonesia. The latter property – a highly profitable natural gas field on Indonesia’s Sumatra peninsula – drew ExxonMobil’s executives immediately into the bloody war for independence being waged by the Free Aceh Movement, known by the initials G.A.M. ExxonMobil paid Indonesian military forces to battle G.A.M. around the perimeter of its fields; human rights investigators accused the Indonesian forces of engaging in widespread torture and abuses. G.A.M. rocketed and attacked ExxonMobil and its employees, seeing the corporation as complicit with the Indonesian military.Continue Reading...

Jonathan Franzen wants you to like him. In "Mr. Difficult," a 2002 New Yorker essay, Franzen identifies two types of authorship: the Status model, devoted to the pursuit of difficult art at the expense of commercial gain, and the Contract model, which privileges the enjoyment and connectedness of the reader. Franzen is, in his own estimation, "a Contract kind of person." His novels don't ask more of the reader than she is willing to give in turn. "[T]o build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn't want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer."Continue Reading...

Kids love hearing the story of their birth and, growing up, I was no exception. I came into the world just as feminists began demanding that women be allowed to labor naturally, huffing and puffing their way through contractions, husbands and friends in the delivery room for emotional support.My mother would have none of that. She was gassed into a twilight sleep and shot up with opiates for the pain. Flat on her back and feet in the stirrups, she pushed on command until I fell into the doctor's arms. My arrival – another girl! -- was announced to my dad, who sat with other bored men in the waiting room. He would first see me through a window, where I was displayed among the other newborns, swaddled tight and sleeping.One final detail I insisted that my mom include with each retelling: "And then you got a shot?""That's right," she would say, referring to the heavy dose of estrogen once routinely injected after a birth. "That way my body wouldn't make milk, and I could go back to work." I couldn't help myself; I cheered.Continue Reading...

If you are a reader who cares about nature, wilderness, our place in nature, writing and nature, how to choose a course of action when something you care about is threatened, the lifelong search for voice, and what it means to be a woman in this world, you will have crossed paths with the work of Terry Tempest Williams. Perhaps you grew up reading Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder and Bill McKibben and, loving their work, still felt something missing -- that your relationship with these issues was not fully rendered. Then you discovered Williams, and, not unlike Alfred Stieglitz’s famous response when he first saw Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, you might have breathed: "At last! A woman on paper!"A woman on paper.Continue Reading...

From Paris in 1871 to Prague in 1968 to Cairo in 2011 and eventually the streets of New York City, cities have long been a hotbed of radical movements. Over the decades, urban protests have been spurred by everything from unemployment and food shortages to privatization and corruption. But were they also caused by the geography of the cities themselves? The question has particular resonance this week, as Occupy prepares for a series of large May 1 protests in cities around the country.Geographer and social theorist David Harvey, the distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and one of the 20 most cited humanities scholars of all time, has spent his career exploring how cities organize themselves, and when they do, what their achievements are. His new book, "Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution," dissects the effects of free-market financial policy on urban life, the crippling debt of middle- and low-income Americans and how runaway development has destroyed a common space for all city dwellers.Continue Reading...

Ron Rash's atmospheric, strangely uncomplicated novel, "The Cove," begins with a scene of melancholy and abandonment, the promise of obliteration, and a shocking discovery. It is 1953 and a man called Parton, a scout for the Tennessee Valley Authority, is investigating a remote parcel of land in North Carolina's Appalachia for inhabitants who will have to be evicted in advance of the valley's inundation. In a small notch -- from which the book takes its title -- over which looms a light-exterminating, anvil-shaped cliff, he finds a deserted farm. Pasture fenced by sagging barbed wire, a collapsed barn, a cabin and two wells are the desolate relicts of past life and labor. The general doominess of the setting is further enhanced by an ash tree decked in charms against evil forces, dead American chestnut trees (victims of the plague that wiped them out across the land), and the memory of the now extinct Carolina parakeet. Parton, thirsty, manages to winch up a bucket of water from one of the wells -- and with it a human skull.Continue Reading...

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, and returned to England in 1946, having been interned with his family in a Japanese prison camp, an experience that inspired his most popular novel, "Empire of the Sun." Ballard's astonishing fiction ranges across continents and galaxies, but a quiet London suburb was his home until his death in 2009, and it is to the suburbs that he returned in his last novel, "Kingdom Come." In its opening pages, the narrator, a London advertising executive named Richard Pearson, travels to one of the "perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25" to find out who murdered his father.  It sounds like the setup for a cosy English mystery.  But this is Ballard.  It will not be cosy.Continue Reading...

Laura Hazard Owen has a good overview of what’s going on with Worldreader. Give a kid a Kindle and lives are changed. Not just in Ghana but in Kenya and Uganda as well. One of their costs is buying the ebooks that go on the Kindles they’re giving to students. Really? Tell me again why [...]

Everyone knows that cities like New York, Boston and Chicago have flipped the script over the past couple of decades, turning richer and whiter as their surrounding suburbs grow more diverse. Today, you're more likely to hear Farsi and Thai spoken in the sprawling cul-de-sacs outside of Atlanta than you are in many parts of the Starbucks-soaked city center itself.Exactly how this happened, however, doesn't get as much ink. We just assume that a lot of the kids who watched "Friends" in the '90s decided they'd like to engage in witty repartee at Central Perk. But that's just a small slice of what caused the massive shift that Alan Ehrenhalt details in his new book, released this week, "The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City." In a wide-ranging survey of gentrified urban cores, struggling exurbs and outer-ring suburbs that went from lily white to multicultural seemingly overnight, he identifies the trends, policies and mayors that propelled the largest migration since the postwar suburban boom, and speculates on what our cities will look like 10 years down the road.Continue Reading...