Selected Works
New York Times Magazine
The Case Against Reparations Through Art
You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed.
And yet something is off, something that makes these stories impossible to get lost in. You can never fully envision the Magical Multiracial Past without having to mentally take apart the entire scaffolding of world history. “Bridgerton” is set before Britain abolished slavery, an institution that apparently exists, largely unmentioned, in the world of the show. What, precisely, are the rules of a world in which a Black queen reigns over a British Empire that sanctions the enslavement of Black people?
Did ‘Demolition Man’ Predict the Millennial?
Growing up with those movies, I liked to keep a mental scorecard concerning which of their futures seemed most likely. I would have hoped that by now we’d be experiencing the vibrant urban chaos of “The Fifth Element” (1997). But no. What about HAL and the blind faith in technological advancement that connotes progress in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)? Kind of. The computers controlled by constant hand-waving in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” (2002)? Not quite. All of these are classics, but the one that I think got it most right is a 1993 action-comedy whose hallmark is a tremendous recurring poop joke.
Harper’s
The European Union rules against contemporary art
The affair reminded many people of the 1928 decision by U.S. Customs to classify Constantin Brancusi’s abstract bronze Bird in Space as a kitchen utensil. (Flavin’s first-ever fluorescent-light sculpture, from 1963, was dedicated to Brancusi.) “I was sick to receive the news that a bastard in New York made you pay duty on your sculpture,” Ezra Pound wrote to Brancusi.
Fighting for the right to insult the French president
“The particular problem between French and English derives from the meager quantity of insults in French and the abundance of them in English,” said Adam Thorpe, a translator who published a new version of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin in November. Casse-toi, first recorded as a command in 1835, uses the reflexive form of the verb casser, “to break.” Con is trickier; it owes its origins to the Latin for “vulva,” cunnus, and was in common use in medieval French. “There is no doubt that the meaning of con has become trivialized and weakened over time,” Jean-Paul Colin, an editor of Larousse’s Dictionnaire de l’argot et du français populaire, told me. Now the word is mainly used to point out acts of stupidity—and is thus indispensable for anyone living in France.
New Yorker
Is World Wrestling Entertainment Helping to Reinvent TV?
When I was a child, I loved professional wrestling. In 1991, at the age of ten, I asked to stay up late with my father to watch my favorite wrestler, the Ultimate Warrior, battle against Randy Savage, the Macho King, in a loser-must-retire match at WrestleMania 7. But it was a school night, and he said no. Instead, he recorded it for me on VHS. The next day, I jumped out of bed and asked him not to tell me what had happened. Then I asked him what had happened. My father smiled and said, “You’ll enjoy it.” And, despite the Warrior getting hit by no less than five elbows in a row from the top rope, I did.
New York Times
A Place Where Ms. Pac-Man Still Has a Home
It is Friday night at the Chinatown Fair video arcade, one of the last of the traditional arcades left in the city. Inside, it’s hot and sweaty and the walls are blood-red. Amid the kids and the trash-talking and chaos, an older Chinese man stands quietly in the corner playing Jr. Pac-Man.