There is a memorable scene in the film Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), in which Logan 5 (Michael York), in his jovial state of idleness, teleports a series of potential female partners from the community-run circuit (meat market). When a woman of his fancy is finally beamed into his apartment (whose name is revealed later on in the film as Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter)), Logan welcomes her with open arms, “Let’s have sex!”

In a thoughtful, somewhat agonized article in The American Scholar (Summer 2008), Charles Johnson offered the view that the classic African-American experience narrative—slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, civil rights, Dr. King, unrest, Black Panthers, painful rises and frustrated struggles—doesn’t correspond in its totality with the histories that many self-designated black people living in America today carry with them. Black immigrants from v...

My daughter's preschool class cast their votes for president the same Tuesday that everyone else did. I'm not sure when her teachers called it for the Democrat, but the outcome was the same as the official one only more so: Obama 13; McCain 4. I wasn't all that surprised by the result (her school is in lower Manhattan, after all). But I was struck by how tenacious the moment was for her. She'll happily tell you who she voted for and who ...

In view of the historic inauguration on Tuesday, January 20, we here at printculture will be posting all week on all things Obama. Join in on the conversation in the comments section. To kick things off, I have just a couple of quick thoughts:

My baby is the clear choice for president this November. My baby won't use a lot of big words to try to confuse you. He doesn't know any words yet. But he has a good heart. My baby won't cut and run in Iraq. He can't even crawl yet. You'll know where my baby stands on any given issue: wherever I left him, because, as previously mentioned, he can't crawl away . . .

OK, so I was listening to a friend today who was concerned that people had invested “messianic” hopes in Obama. Hopes that he would solve all our problems and leave us something extra under the tree at Christmas. To my mind the difference between the Obamacious candidate and the Bush II knock-off is extreme, maybe even world-historical or sublime in proportion, but if we have to worry about something, let it be about whether he can...

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”[1] Thus, in 1775, before the founding of the Republic and even before its unilateral declaration of independence, Dr. Samuel Johnson pinched a nerve of American identity—perhaps the nerve of American identity. It is certainly my nerve.

Last week, Printculture commenter Babykong, searching for reasons to turn away from the blinding light of my summary of Watership Down, whose photon-drenched penumbra had laid bare the furthest reaches of his conscience, requested that the blog give him material that would be a little easier on his soul: something, for gods' sake, on the current election. Well, here it is.

On my way home from a conference in New Orleans last weekend, I noticed the following sign posted near the security checkpoint conveyor belt: Security is no laughing matter. All comments will be taken seriously.

I was one of the voters who didn’t know which Democratic candidate I was going to vote for until the night before. There was less at stake in my vote, because it was assumed that Illinois would go to Obama (which it did), but I still struggled with the question of who to support. Part of it is my own fault – I haven’t been paying that much attention to the debates and the publicly stated policy positions. I liked Edwards’s consistently more ...

The video of Hilary Clinton “tearing up” as she talked with a group of New Hampshire voters the day before the primary last week, already the obsessive subject of the media's short-term attention a week ago, may well thanks to Clinton's surprise victory have established itself as “historical.” The move from flavor-of-the-day coverage to event-creating object came as the wave of women voters supporting Clinton were widel...

It seems like ancient history now, but during Printculture’s summer vacation the furor around Michael Vick’s involvement in dog fighting seemed like something I was more-or-less obligated to comment on. If you’re fortunate enough to have been able either to avoid the story or to repress your knowledge of it, the long and the short of it is that Atlanta Falcons’ quarterback Michael Vick pled guilty to charges stemming from a federal investigati...

Two people I'd never heard of emerged into the national consciousness this week*, each of them engaged in public conduct that they have presumably come to regret. That Miss Teen South Carolina and Idaho Senator Larry Craig were bound together in public ignominy in the last week of August, 2007 is probably the last thing they'll ever have in common. In what follows I want to think about the kind of public culture that would bring these two toge...

A few small things today, just some ideas I've come across or thought this week, but none of them quite large enough to become its own entry. 1. “A Chinese judge charged with corruption died in his cell from ”adult sudden death syndrome“, Xinhua news agency said today.” This is the first line in a real story in a real newspaper. Apparently “ASDS” has been known to strike a variety of prisoners held in Chines...

I saw Ted Leo and his band play recently at a converted movie theater in South Philly. Leo crouches before a down-tilted mike and aims his voice up at it, spraying his sine wave vocals out like Silly String. When he's not singing he comes up with a few sideways leg spasms that don't look much better on him than they did on Pete Townshend thirty years ago. Between songs he really wants to talk but the crowd isn't having any.

Recently in the American Scholar, Thomas Mallon challenged readers with 10 questions about American intellectual life today. As our regular readers know, the gang at Printculture thought we should rally the troops and try to actually answer them. The one that interested me in particular was #7.

Once on a vacation I was sitting in a Seattle diner and overheard two strangers fall into an animated conversation at the lunch counter. It was the fall of 2004, shortly before the Bush-Kerry election. Neither could believe that the country had fallen into the hands of radicals. Neither could believe what a dramatic transformation had taken place in such a short time, how the level of discourse had plummeted, how a bunch of crazies were ruling...

Almost as if by design, the pattern of outrage that has surrounded the Bush administration has taken on a pattern so regular as to become numbing. Bad Thing X happens, and at the time it happens we hear either nothing about it or an explanation that will eventually be revealed to be false.   Bad Thing X is revealed, too late to prevent its ill effects and late enough that interest in the original event can now be characterized as that most un...

Now showing in New York, though not for long: The First Emperor, an opera written, scored, and directed by the Chinese Gesamtkunstwerk all-stars Ha Jin, Tan Dun, and Zhang Yimou. Designed--like Tan Dun's music more generally--to be the first major merging of Chinese and Italian operatic styles, The First Emperor is both a cultural and political document of its times, a reflection of the rising power of China's cultural emigrant class and, in t...

Somewhere, sometime, fifty or sixty years from now, someone could do worse than write an academic paper or even a dissertation on race and comedy in George W. Bush's America. Such a paper would bring together the following people and events: Sarah Silverman, Sasha Baron Cohen, and Dave Chapelle on the one hand, and Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic rant and Michael Richards' racist one on the other.

This past Friday, The Explainer, a regular Slate column in which Daniel Engber and others address questions occasioned by the news, offered a brief history of the citizenship questions asked of immigrants who are being “naturalized.” The piece was prompted by an announcement that the Department of Homeland Security unveiled a new set of sample questions to be used in pilot tests that are meant both to standardize the tests’ content and to make...

Leading up to the 2004 presidential election, I hoped Kerry would win for a variety of reasons. There were practical changes I expected his administration would make, policies that I expected to agree with more than those offered by Bush. I hoped that the country would repudiate Bush’s war in Iraq by voting him out. More generally, though, I really believed that it would do everyone some good to have their emotional and identificatory ties ...

Well, it wasn't as full of snark and joking as the Oscars blog we did, but the Printculture gang took a quick break from buying crystal meth from gay masseuses (before throwing it away, of course) to spend last night blogging the 2006 elections. I spent most of my time providing results, while H Saussy and S Shirazi stopped in late for commentary, and the intrepid LWan filled up the comment fields... Read all about it here.

With any luck in a matter of days the furor over John Kerry’s botched joke will be over and the political news will be dominated by something really important, like the discovery that a Democratic Congressman somewhere in Michigan is driving a French car, or something Sean Penn says about gay marriage, or the revelation that someone with a subscription to The New York Times once smoked pot, followed by the White House demand that the paper ret...

1. Tenure. Pros: Protects academic freedom Creates job security Cons: Allows people to get away with doing no work or bad teaching So the problem is, how do you resolve the con without getting rid of the pros?