Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a novel about a nightmare road trip across America. The protagonist is Abbott, an anxious, 26-year-old Lyft driver who spends his free time as a small-time streamer. The story starts when Abbott meets Ether, a voluble young woman who offers him $200,000 […]
In recent weeks, I have joined millions of my fellow Americans who are trying to understand and cope with the overwhelming changes that are sweeping through our sociopolitical landscape. As I pinball between moments of despair, confusion, curiosity, and the occasional glimmer of hope, one of the questions that keeps coming back around is: Who […]
Summary: Charlie D. Hankin’s Break and Flow examines the language, culture, history, and politics of hip hop in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. Organizing his chapters around a series of themes––yearning, raplove, uprooting, scale, writing, and violence––Hankin invites the reader to consider the many ways that hip hop culture and rap music have influenced (and been influenced by) […]
“Human cultures are in constant flux. Is this flux completely random, or does it have some overall pattern? In other words, does history have a direction? The answer is yes. Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilisations, so that the world contains fewer and fewer mega-cultures, each of […]