by James McGirk I do not follow contemporary cinema, but with the Oscars looming, I felt obliged to weigh in on the moving image as I experience it. Since I do not own a television and lack the sophistication and desire to sift through darknets and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks hunting for shows to download, I…

by James McGirk “The most masculine of cats,” tout defenders of the breed, and they are indeed rugged, solid creatures who look as if they ought to be de-mousing a lighthouse on the stormy coast of Maine rather than sprawling on the settee. That is, after all, what they were probably bred for. Picture a…

by James McGirk You never look directly at the face. Catch only glimpses of it and those glimpses are ever changing. One moment he is a she. The next there is a hissing void where a face should be. The only constant is an hourglass that hangs above its pillow, a cartoonish thing with the…

by James McGirk Our brains are filled with the whispering of objects, the shrieking presence of things we lust after or despise or simply want to ignore but can’t for all the noise. It seems impossible to write fiction without addressing it but so little does. Part of this is the nature of the medium.…

by James McGirk A large pile of garbage has accumulated outside my front door. One of my neighbors is fighting with our landlord. She leaves bags of refuse just outside of the receptacle, untied and upside down so as to better disgorge their payload of soiled panty-liners onto the pavement in front of our house.…

by James McGirk As I approach my fifteenth year living in the United States, I thought I ought peek under the hood and scrape some of the gunk off my filters to see how much distortion and prejudice has crept in between my ears. Marco Polo, patron saint of expatriate literature provides an excellent experimental…

by James McGirk The lowland of online discourse – that virtual Benelux where bloggers, essayists, and opinion writers grope for fragments of attention – has been flooded with essays weighing the worth of writing degrees; particularly the Master of Fine Arts degree. Discussion tends to hit its annual zenith around September as magazines such as…

by James McGirk When I heard the Federal Bureau of Investigation might have figured out the identity of seventies skyjacker D.B. Cooper I was really upset. Who among us hasn’t felt a smidge of sympathy for the outlaw? Well into my thirties, having finally completed my education and finding myself without short-term goals to strive…

by James McGirk I never had a problem with Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s oft-mocked remark about the Internet being a series of tubes. I saw it with my own eyes (metaphorically speaking) as a teenager growing up in New Delhi. The Internet was a feed of information that trickled in drip by drip, slowly increasing…

by James McGirk Writers are anxious about the Internet and all things electronic, as we worry these newfangled ways of entertaining ourselves might someday obviate our own work. The solution, perhaps, lies in understanding and adapting to this new medium. Consuming enough that we can master its complexities and render appealingly intelligent confections for our…

by James McGirk I was born beside Sigmund Freud’s London townhome, and spent the next eighteen years ferried between Europe and Asia. Nominally American, it was not until I was seventeen-years-old that I could actually call the U.S. home, and even then I was so jangled from the shock of moving from India to a…

James McGirk A year and decade after the turn of the century, things looked dire in the United States of America, but not that dire: the economy was stagnant after an exuberant but lopsided decade of prosperity, job opportunities for graduates and social climbers had dwindled to a few openings changing bedpans for the large,…

by James McGirk The “gallery” still exists on paper and hosts an occasional salon – these being one-night-only performances choked with marijuana fumes and haunted by octogenarian Warhol hangers-on and younger artists whose parents are presumed to have money – but lost its physical space five years ago. Today the gallery is a husk, but…

by James McGirk New York City’s skyline should be familiar to most readers, a vertical city, slender shafts of steel and glass erupting from a jostling street culture, with an occasional verdant hamlet lurking in its shadows, courtesy of Jane Jacobs and Frederick Law Olmsted. At its core the city is a ferocious machine, churning…

The spark that lit the tinder was a series of what began as peaceful protests followed by disproportionate – and uneven – countermeasures by the Tunisian government. Protests began after the public self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor left destitute after harassment by local authorities. Early media coverage was stifled and word of the…

Writers are risk-averse. Necessarily so, because writing is really a sort of willful blindness, each sentence depending on all the ones preceding it, the way digging a tunnel depends on each shovel scoop. Experimentation is potentially catastrophic (or worse, embarrassing). With the exception of a few scurries into modernism and postmodernism prose has barely evolved…

As legions of cool-hunters trawling the Internet and bohemian sectors of cities are well aware, given that most subcultures are spun around a kernel of hoodlum glamour and guilt-free rutting, selling youth culture is not exactly hard. Youth movements are appropriated and neutralized at such a ferocious rate, that no musical subculture since “Gangsta Rap”…