June 13, 2016 Our Correspondents Unconventional, Part 1: Ed Sanders and the Liberal Puritan By Nathan Gelgud In anticipation of the Republican and Democratic national conventions later this summer, Nathan Gelgud, one of the Daily’s new correspondents, will be posting a regular weekly comic about the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the contested 1968 DNC. Read More
June 10, 2016 Our Correspondents My Autobibliography By Matthew St. Ville Hunte Building a library in Saint Lucia. This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Matthew St. Ville Hunte. The first book I consciously acquired for what became my library was V.S. Naipaul’s The Writer and the World. I purchased it at a Nigel R. Khan Bookstore in the departure lounge of Trinidad’s Piarco Airport. This was 2004; I was flying home to Saint Lucia after I spent a summer working for an Afrocentric radical while finishing my junior year in college. At the time, I was drifting into a literary life, thanks mainly to the lack of a serious commitment to anything else. I set myself a program: I would read not just for pleasure or to acquaint myself with the best of what had come before me but to find out where I could fit in as a writer. Naipaul—jaded, deracinated, and irredeemably West Indian—seemed like a natural model. Read More
June 9, 2016 Our Correspondents Live Online By Wei Tchou Tending my Internet archive. J. M. W. Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters, 1844, oil on canvas. This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Wei Tchou. My parents visited me a few weeks ago, when I was feeling blue for the normal New York reasons: another breakup, a looming eviction, the smell of dead rats wafting up from the basement of my building. (The exterminator hadn’t been by in a while.) My father brought along a few things to cheer me up. The two-and-a-half pound tin of “European Formula” Ovaltine turned out to be something of a ruse; he’s diabetic, so my mother doesn’t normally allow him that sort of indulgence. But he also brought three beautiful, hard-to-find bottles of baijiu, a high-proof Chinese liquor, along with a memory. “I was reading through my date book from this time in 1983,” he told me. “Thirty-three years ago, I was receiving a notice every week to arrive in Philadelphia to be deported.” Read More