poetry

The Many Facades of Love: A Handpicked Collection of Love Poems

The Many Facades of Love: A Handpicked Collection of Love Poems

What is Love? Poets try to answer the question with one love poem and announce their “failure” by writing another after another… Our history is full of love poems, and yet our urge is still to sing about love, and to untangle the very idea of love.

Clickbait Review: Valzhyna Mort's Collected Body

Clickbait Review: Valzhyna Mort's Collected Body

Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort’s first collection written in English, Collected Body, is a complex tapestry of characters and their familial stories. In the collection, readers are constantly threatened by a sense of imminent death. Yet, instead of an end, death here becomes a means of union.

Clickbait Review: Nathan Jurgenson's The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media

Clickbait Review: Nathan Jurgenson's The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media

By now it is no novel question to ask what the humanities owe the sciences, or indeed the sciences the humanities. The specture of the automaton is as old as the golem, which is to say as ancient as monotheism: this social anxiety regarding the essence of our humanity and its relationship to technology predates our modern conceptions of science. However, the meteoric rise in the social, political, and economic influence of technology companies such as Google, Apple, and Facebook demands that we continue reforming not only our answers to this question but our material responses to it. Social media theorist, editor emeritus of The New Inquiry, and sociologist at Snap Inc., Nathan Jurgenson addresses these disciplines via cyborg hybridity in his book The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media.

Travel Around the World During Self-Quarantine

Travel Around the World During Self-Quarantine

As the pandemic ravages the world, my plans to travel to Seattle, Wyoming, Austin, as well as back to Asia seem to have been postponed indefinitely. Looking back the past month, I realize that the only trip I’ve made was a 10 minute walk to the closest grocery store. Yet, within that 10 minute, I found I was feeling upset about not just the prospect of not being able to travel, but also I miss the “city” so much -- the New York bustling with life, news and videos of events happening all over the world.