January 1, 2019 Best of 2018 Hunting for a Lesbian Canon By Yelena Moskovich We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! At the Aligre flea market near my Parisian flat, I haggle over a trinket I’ve decided to give to my on-the-rocks lover. It is a rock, a small but well-shined one. Twenty euros is too much, I insist. I’m from Ukraine, I tell the seller, in an attempt to get sympathy for my country’s political climate in the form of a discount. He replies that our eyes are drawn to objects that can read us between the lines. I pay the twenty. Let’s back up: as a Ukrainian kiddo during the fall of the Soviet Union, at six years old, I was held back from starting school while my family awaited immigration approval. The process dragged on for over a year, and when we were finally granted entry into the American Midwest as Jewish refugees, I was seven, and my literacy a club-footed Cyrillic. I was put into an Orthodox Jewish school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and began groping my way through two more alphabets, English and Hebrew. The page transformed into a vertical stage, complete with curtains of chattering. Read more >>
January 1, 2019 Best of 2018 Paris, Reviewed By Rosa Rankin-Gee We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Real life reviews from the City of Light, compiled from TripAdvisor.com Musee d’Orsay MUSÉE D’ORSAY Not worth unless you are into art Only go if you are interested in art history. I love history, but I couldn’t stay here for more than an hour, as its pictures doesn’t make sense to me. EIFFEL TOWER Very not good! We expect from the Eiffel Tower something romantic. But we got—very not good and not clean around the Eiffel Tower! At night you can’t see the city of Paris because there is not enough lighting!!! After visiting the Eiffel Tower, NO body helped us to find the way to go down!!! Read more >>
January 1, 2019 Best of 2018 Are We All Joyceans Here, Then? By James Frankie Thomas We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Detail from the Penguin Modern Classics cover of Ulysses. “Are we all Joyceans here, then?” the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway. We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us “Joyceans” seemed like a stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And besides, this was City College. No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper—I’ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it. It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. “NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,” but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all. Read more >>
December 31, 2018 Best of 2018 The Bloody Family History of the Guillotine By Edward White We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! In 1788, a French blacksmith named Mathurin Louschart was killed in his home by a single blow to the head. The act was committed in the blink of an eye, but the feud motivating it had festered for months. Earlier that year, the deeply conservative Mathurin had apparently taken offense at his son Jean’s newfangled ideas about liberty and equality. Jean was vocal about his beliefs, which were stoking the fires of radicalism throughout France. Not content with throwing his son out of the family home, Mathurin attempted to punish him further by arranging to marry Jean’s girlfriend, Helen. Helen’s family was only too pleased to palm off their daughter to a vaunted member of the community, but Helen herself despaired at the prospect of being wrenched from Jean and shackled to a brooding old ogre for the rest of her life. Jean hatched a plan: he arrived one night at his father’s house to rescue Helen and ride off into the egalitarian sunset. But Mathurin interrupted their escape, and a fight ensued. Jean lashed out with a hammer. It struck Mathurin flush on the forehead, and the old man died instantly. Read more >>
December 31, 2018 Best of 2018 The Strange History of the “King-Pine” By Nina-Sophia Miralles We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Recent pineapple decorating trends. “There is no nobler fruit in the universe,” Jean de Léry writes of the pineapple. Charles Lamb loved the fruit erotically: “Pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, like a lovers’ kisses she biteth.” Pieter de la Court professes: “One can never be tire’d with looking on it.” How did these men, and so many others, become so enraptured with the pineapple? And how have we forgotten its former grandeur? In 1496, when Christopher Columbus was returning from his second voyage to the Americas, he brought back a consignment of pineapples. Little did he know that this golden gift, nestled among the tame parrots, tomatoes, tobacco, and pumpkins, would be the crowning glory of his cargo. Read more >>
December 31, 2018 Best of 2018 The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints By Chantel Tattoli We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can’t fingerprint you, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you can’t fingerprint yourself, the sites of the bureau-approved, USA-based channelers stated. Perhaps, I thought, I would gather my smirches—all those wasted on laptop screens, medicine cabinets, and eyeglasses—and dump them on a bureaucrat’s desk, like payment rendered in coin. Instead, I fell on a National Fingerprint Collecting Clearinghouse technician named Eve Humrich. She has built a career on the fingertips of expats. I met her at her office on a mezzanine inside a squash club in Montmartre (though she travels between Paris, London, and Brussels for her clients). “I need to see your ID,” Humrich said. I showed my passport—using one type of identification to badge me into the realm of another. Humrich kissed each digit to a lubricious black pad, then onto an official paper card. With a small magnifying lens, she inspected the results: “These are nice and clear.” Read more >>