Here’s the second part of interesting articles for this year, where the fun stuff is.
Art, Reviews and Cultural Criticism
Here’s Why Liking Something I Don’t Like Makes You A Bad Person Damien Kronfeld at The Reductress has a … reductionist take on cultural criticism
Outlaw Kings and Rebellion Chic You may have noticed that revolution and rebellion in the abstract is incredibly popular in pop culture but remains nebulous and content-free. This realization leads Alister MacQuarrie to lament, in the New Socialist, that more pop culture is not explicitly Communist.
The Movie Assassin Sarah Miller takes about 20 years to write an incredibly scathing review of the English Patient in Popula, weaving in autobiography, economics, and contemplations on the idea of authenticity.
Kenan Malik writes interestingly on cultural appropriation in ArtReview (this is how I knew to put it in this section) and explains the problems with the concept.
“Consent” is the wrong framework for experiencing art is both the title and the thesis of Gretchen Felker-Martin‘s persuasive piece on complaints about video games in gawker.
Books and Translation
The “Heroic Translators” who Reinvented Classic Science Fiction in China the standards of translation have varied widely across times and cultures, and Ken Liu, himself an excellent translator, tells a tale of one such standard, for the translations of Jules Verne into Chinese, for Gizmodo.
Руководство по постройке мостов через безконечность [in Russian] S.B. Pereslegin introduces some Strugatsky Brothers translations by noticing that they are better than the originals, and building a whole theory of translation around that.
The ___’s Daughter Emily St. John Mandel discovers that a bunch of books are named that, and engages in some descriptive statistics in the Millions.
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei [PDF] Eliot Weinberger interestingly and brutally, though not always convincingly, critiques many different translations of a Chinese poem.
Profiles, Narrative and Fiction
The Triumph of the Crayolatariat Greg Allen visits the crayola factory museum
What Happened to Lee? Sandra Upson recounts the strange and tragic tale of Cloudfare cofounder Lee Holloway in WIRED.
Ghosts of the Tsunami [partially paywalled] Richard Lloyd Parry in the London Review of Books investigates ghost stories that have sprung up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster
Apocalypse Meow the story, written by Bob Smetana for the Nashville Scene, is completely nuts, but it’s included here mainly for its wonderful title and cover illustration
The War to Sell You a Mattress is an Internet Nightmare [no longer available] David Zax gets offered a free mattress, and falls down a sordid rabbit hole of shady internet marketing, litigious corporations and fake reviews. He wrote this up in a very entertaining article at Fast Company that’s no longer accessible, probably because somebody at a mattress company sued.
There are Two Ways of Living, according to Robert Reed.
Однажды я вынес из Эрмитажа картины [in Russian] Vladimir Ufland recounts the story of an unsanctioned exhibition at the Ermitage in Ogoniok. Although I don’t get Ufland’s poetry at all, as a storyteller, he is excellent
Life in the Modern World
A Vast Web of Vengeance [paywalled] Kashmir Hill in the New York Times finds people who have fallen victim to a particularly online form of revenge.
Attack of the Zombie Baby Monitors is, sadly, not a story about zombies who look after babies, but rather a primer about security concerns associated with the internet of things written by Zeynep Tufekci for Scientific American.
The Anxiety of Influencers [partially paywalled] Barrett Swanson‘s essay about TikTok in Harper’s is a little bit smarmy, but still a really interesting read.
Rated Zed 