Here in Karachi the solidity of the world around you dispels much of that sense of precariousness one gets by reading about Pakistan from afar. My dashing, mustachioed cousin Munib still rides his father’s forty-year old blue Vespa around the chaotic streets, just as he did in his late teens. One change in his riding…

Sitting on the northeast corner of New York City’s Elizabeth and Spring Streets, the Candle Building was for many years a mystery to passersby.  The five-story brick building has always-closed arched entrances on the ground level.  The bricks are brown and the windows are decorated with a repetition of the arch motif, this times as…

It is the greatest scary movie and the scariest great movie there is.  From its first foreboding shots of a car on mountain roads, The Shining tends to unmoor me completely from my critical faculties.  It’s a cliche that it only gets scarier with each viewing, but I’ll reassert it: I am more scared and…

On the day after CBGB’s closed, it seems appropriate to try something new and dance a little jig to architecture – by which I mean, to write about music.  Not that I’m going to expend a lot of sympathy over the closing of a rock club in a neighborhood that is currently dominated by luxury…

New York, uniquely, inspires proprietary feelings in people who don’t even live here.  All over the world, I’ve noticed, people like to think of their cities in relation to New York.  Bostonians speak of the Boston-New York axis, Washingtonians of the Washington-New York corridor.  Los Angelenos and Chicagoans too.  The English consume a diet of…

Being a fan of Andre Agassi is difficult – there’s too much competition.  He is the most sentimentally revered figure in the history of professional tennis, which can make appreciating him feel like a form of conformity.  For this reason, with the start of the U.S. Open, Agassi’s declared last tournament, many tennis enthusiasts prefer…

Why do I love Crosby Street?  It inspires in me the kind of preference I remember having as a kid for lucky talismans, strange everyday objects I became attached to and took with me: I have a sentimental feeling of loyalty when contemplating it.  Streets go to work with their parallel neighbors and perpendicular interceptors,…

Shocking, unthinkable, infamous, ignominious: these are the words instinctively grasped for in trying to make sense of the act that irrupted into the World Cup final last night.  Rarely does an athlete, playing atop so high a mountain of adulation, so utterly confound and defy the hopeful symbolism that has been placed upon him.  It…

Do women deserve the same prize money at Wimbledon as men?  I’ll get back to that – first, a meandering introduction.  Feminism, since at least Mary Wollestonecraft, has always maintained a productive tension between agitating for gender equality and elaborating gender difference.  The very fact that equal rights for women as subjects and citizens is…

I’m currently living temporarily in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a state of affairs that has led me to think quite a bit about locality.  My dreams, of course, before coming here were to finally make contact with authentic American folkways, and hopefully foodways, to find local diners and farm markets and maybe even meet a grizzled…

For a while now, sculpture and painting’s preeminence among the plastic arts has seemed a little anachronistic.  Painters such as Richter or Freud who stick to using paint to do two-dimensional figurations, or sculptors like Serra who stick to ‘raw’ materials like steel over the found objects that decorate so much installation art, feel classic…

Roland Garros, or tennis’ French Open, started yesterday.  Perhaps you’ve noticed; articles ran in most Sunday papers about it, quite extensive ones too, considering that the French has often been viewed as a third-rate (after Wimbledon and the U.S. Open) Grand Slam tournament, largely because it is usually won by a cadre of specialists instead…

Lahore is perhaps the most underappreciated city in the world.  The widespread ignorance of the charms of such a beautiful, complicated, and historically important city is sad, though unsurprising, given Western conceptions of the Muslim world – India has droves of tourists, while Pakistan has virtually none.  Most of its natives, and most Pakistanis generally,…

There are filmmakers who help us learn to watch movies better. Many of them are canonical: Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Ford, Kubrick, Kiarostami, Sokurov, etc. What links the group of directors I am referring to is the way that watching their movies forces the viewer to pay attention to form. Rather than simply immersing one in plot,…

Strikes have engulfed New York City this winter. While members of the Transit Workers Union have gone back to work, NYU graduate assistants are preparing to resume picketing with the start of term on January 17th (usual disclaimer: me too). The situation is simultaneously encouraging and grim. Administrative threats of three semesters’ loss of work…

In the movie “My Dinner With Andre,” a touchstone for the antic film buff, Wally Shawn muses about the things that make life bearable despite the heavy weight of human suffering and existential dread that torment his friend Andre Gregory. “I just don’t know how anybody could enjoy anything,” he says, “more than I enjoy……

The strike of graduate students at NYU continues.  The single demand of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee remains unmet: that NYU negotiate with their union, as they did since 2001.   (Once again, discloure: I am a member of GSOC, and striking.)  Currently the single most important labor struggle in the nation involving university teaching, the…

This Wednesday, graduate students at New York University will begin a strike with the intention of forcing NYU’s administration to bargain with their chosen collective agent, the union UAW/Local 2110.  (Full disclosure: I am one such, and will be participating in this action.)  This situation has been brewing for months, as the union’s contract with…

In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Paul Greenberg has written this excellent article on the engandered Patagonian toothfish, or Chilean sea bass, to use the current moarketing moniker.  He also touches on the very serious situation of all the ocean predators that humans have become so fond of eating: tuna, cod, etc.  As a huge,…

The first time I saw Edward Said, in 1993, I was an undergraduate studying literature at Johns Hopkins, where he had come to give a lecture.  An extremely pretentious young person, I arrived in the large hall (much larger than the halls in which other visiting literature professors spoke) with a mixture of awe and,…