Culture

Balancing on the Edge of Fashion and Art: A Conversation with Amber Ambrose Aurèle

By Margaret Larmuth
September 7, 2021 | Margaret Larmuth

Photo by Deborah Vaia Amber Ambrose Aurèle is a shoe designer, teacher, and art historicist. In 2012 she graduated as one of the first-generation Master Shoe Design at ArtEZ Fashion Master...
From Andy Warhol’s America to Fantasy America: A Conversation with Curator José Carlos Diaz

By Michelle Johnson
April 28, 2021 | Michelle Johnson

Nona Faustine, In Praise of Famous Men No More, 2019, courtesy of the artist and Two Palms, © by Nona Faustine In Fantasy America, a new exhibit at The Warhol, five cross-discip...
London, the New Capital of Middle Eastern and North African Arts, Culture, Music, and Literature

By Malu Halasa
April 19, 2021 | Malu Halasa

Street mural for Grenfell Tower, with poem by Ben Okri, North Kensington, London, image courtesy of IranWire and #PaintTheChange. London-based writer Malu Halasa canvasses the Middle Easte...
The Roar of the Wronged: Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger

By Yahia Lababidi
January 27, 2021 | Yahia Lababidi

A still image from the film White Tiger (Netflix, 2021). After watching White Tiger, a writer contemplates the film alongside revolution in Egypt, Black Lives Matter prot...
Ninotchka on My Mind

October 23, 2017 | Dubravka Ugrešić

Photo by DeusXFlorida / Flickr Thanks to the marketplace and the “culture of consensus,” writes 2016 Neustadt Prize laureate Dubravka Ugrešić, “art has become our favorite theme park.”...
Race Matters Episode 2: Educator Heather Shotton On Native American Identity

June 15, 2016 | Merleyn Bell

Episode summary Blowback against the long-standing use of Native American mascots highlights issues of identity and cultural appropriation. Supporters of using Native American symbols, names, and im...
Like Rain That Falls: 10 Truisms of Translation

October 28, 2014 | Andrés Ehrenhaus

Photo by Marsha Brockman/Flickr To say literary translation is to commit a pleonasm. All translation is intrinsically literary, in the same way every text is, at least for one of the three legs th...
Investigating the Icelandic Book Flood: A Q&A with Alda Sigmundsdóttir

June 20, 2013 | Michelle Johnson

Photo: Annie Atkins Last Christmas Day, NPR ran a story about the preeminence of the book among Christmas gifts in Iceland. In a country that has the most books per capita in the world, publishers re...
“Gangnam Style”: Crossing Over in the New World

January 9, 2013 | Andrew Lam

Anthropologists and linguists no doubt are having a field day trying to chronicle and dissect how, in the early autumn of 2012, “Gangnam Style” became an American idiomatic expression. It stands for...