January 11, 2015 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring Honoré Daumier, Advice to Subscribers, 1840. Michel Houellebecq defends his controversial new novel, Soumission. * How did the future look from the past? Jason Z. Resnikoff sees the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien. * In the early nineties, Paul Thomas Anderson found an inspirational teacher: David Foster Wallace. * Dan Piepenbring on the demise of R&B groups and the promise of D’Angelo’s new album, Black Messiah. * “Being interesting, at a very basic level, is sort of the point of telling a story in the first place.” Thomas Pierce talks to James Yeh. * Michael Thomson on The Evil Within, a horror video game that breaks all the rules. * Five new paintings by Mamma Andersson. * Ben Mauk visits Berlin‘s art book fair. * Plus, Sadie Stein on the history of okay; and a poem by the late Stanislaw Baranczak.
December 7, 2014 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring E. Ravel, from Die Gartenlaube, 1891. Our new Winter issue is here. Learn more about its cover, which features a photograph from Marc Yankus. * “Art isn’t always what—or where—you expect to find it.” Nicole Rudick looks at art ephemera. * Walter Benjamin used to write a radio show for children—here he tells a story with thirty brainteasers. (We’ll post the answers on Thursday.) * “I think poetry is always one or two poets away from extinction.” Michael Hofmann and Jack Livings talk about poetry, translation, and Vespas. * An interview with Julia Wertz about her online comic, Fart Party, now collected in a new book, The Museum of Mistakes. “I’m a real bitch in my work. No one likes a happy-go-lucky character—that’s the character everyone wants to see destroyed.” * Twenty-five years after Wild at Heart, Barry Gifford’s novels are still weird on top. * Two centuries after the Marquis de Sade, a French exhibition traces his influence. * Plus, Sadie Stein sees how far a full-page ad in The New York Times goes; and Joseph Conrad thinks the world is plenty mysterious enough as it is, thanks.
November 30, 2014 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring Max Slevogt, Der Sänger Francisco d’Andrade, Zeitung lesend, 1903. “I am writing from a place you have never been, / Where the trains don’t run, and planes / Don’t land … ” Remembering Mark Strand. * Justin Taylor talks to Shelly Oria about her new book, New York 1 Tel Aviv 0. “What I’m trying to do, not only as a writer but as a human—is challenge this idea of either-or, hang out a bit in the in-between space.” * Paul Muldoon rereads his first book of poetry, 1971’s Knowing My Place … * … And Alec Soth annotates his monograph Niagara, including new photographs. * “You can look at a piece of mine and think that it’s a benign exploration, but I like to think there’s an edge underneath it all in terms of certain commentaries on relationships.” An interview with Gladys Nilsson. * Plus, Sadie Stein on Thanksgiving traditionalists, and Simon Rowe’s winning entry from our Windows on the World contest.
November 23, 2014 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring Georgios Jakobides, Girl Reading, ca. 1882, oil on canvas. Never-before-heard recordings of Maya Angelou, Denise Levertov, and Gary Snyder from our ongoing collaboration with 92Y. * Why has Italian cinema lost its appeal abroad? Antonio Monda sees a pattern: “The films that speak to a world audience deliver a poetic or extreme image of Italy, or of an ‘Italy,’ that gibes with the image foreigners already have of it.” * Lilly Lampe reviews “Teen Paranormal Romance,” a group exhibition inspired by the burgeoning genre of YA lit. * Damion Searls hears haiku in the rhythms of American speech. * A brief history of insect control: James McWilliams tells the surprisingly fascinating story of how pesticides came to dominate American agriculture. * Plus, Sadie Stein on migraines, “the most glamorous of headaches”; some thoughts on vape, the OED’s 2014 Word of the Year; and Duane Hanson’s Security Guard patrols an art gallery in terrifying solitude.
November 9, 2014 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Davoser Café, 1928. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jenny Erpenbeck remembers her childhood in East Berlin: “My parents would bring me to the end of Leipziger Strasse, to the area right in front of the Wall … This was where the world came to an end. For a child, what could be better than growing up at the end of the world?” * And Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi visits East Berlin’s famous Karl-Marx-Allee, where the Stalinist architecture still reminds of the dreams of another era. * “At the Well”: four new paintings by East Germany’s Neo Rauch. * Sam Stephenson on the insightful, unconventional approach to biography on display in Tennessee Williams: Notebooks. * Why is a penny called a penny? Damion Searls looks at the etymology of our coins. * Plus, Sadie Stein looks back at the dark days of her creative-writing workshop and Black Bart the Outlaw Poet strikes again. (“I’ve labored long and hard for bread,/ For honor, and for riches,/ But on my corns too long you’ve tread,/ You fine-haired sons of bitches.”)
November 1, 2014 In Case You Missed It This Week on the Daily By Dan Piepenbring Detail from Carl Ostersetzer, Wirtshauspolitik, 1914, oil on panel. James McGirk writes from Oklahoma, where plans for a public satanic ritual expose cultural fault-lines and religion seems to permeate every aspect of life. “They want your soul and they’re willing to fight for it.” * Preparing for the Day of the Dead, Rex Weiner reports from Casa Dracula, a haunted house for writers on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. * Looking at the controversy surrounding The Death of Klinghoffer, Michael Friedman reminds us that grand opera has always been intertwined with the politics of the day. * Dwyer Murphy interviews David Gordon: “My protagonists eat a lot of Chinese food and go to a lot of cafés. People tend to have cats in my stories, and the women have long fingers. I have no idea where this stuff comes from. I have no lost love with long fingers.” * Now that the World Series is over, Adam Sobsey has a simple request decades in the making: “Let’s get Dock Ellis into the Hall of Fame.” * Plus, Sadie Stein looks at the outmoded fun on display in Cupid’s Cyclopedia; what scares the staff of The Paris Review? (Taylor Swift, among other things); and Thackeray’s doodles reveal his macabre side.