Kristen

Television’s Best Publishing Advice

When I started working at a publishing house, I found myself re-watching The Office to relieve stress and to glean some kind of knowledge about how to adjust to cubicle life. We spend so much time at work, so why are workplace shows and movies so appealing? Is it because of the possibility that a portrayal will be an affirming reflection of all the dysfunctional idiosyncrasies of the workplace, or is it because of how laughably wrong the portrait will……

A Scout Is…

  This piece is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Surveillance Security for All Seasons

From my bedroom window, I see three security cameras affixed to the laundromat’s facade across the street, a large police camera parked at a busy intersection, two strapped to a traffic pole, and a sign that reads neighborhood watch: if i don’t call the police, my neighbors will. If it feels as though we’re being watched, it’s because we are.Surveillance has existed as long as power has, and artists have always worked within the tension of seeing and being seen,……

Silly Love Songs

                            This piece is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Quiz to Find Your Quiz

Over the course of the twentieth century, personality quizzes shifted from the realms of psychology and science to those of self-help and entertainment. In the process, their pop-cultural forms multiplied exponentially from simple yes-or-no questions to quizzes based on more com-plicated disciplines, such as psychology and mathematics. Instead of being administered by a professional, or relying on an overarching dogma (helpfully shaking the woo-woo reputation of birth charts or palmistry in the process), the American personality test combines individualist notions……

Easy Listening

This comic is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Hermeneutics of the Celebrity Meal

#MetooSweden

Respawns and Recovery

Pinan

This comic was supported in part by the Tran Thi Oanh Fund.

Avian Behavior

Questions

This comic was supported in part by the Tran Thi Oanh Fund.

City in Color

The Believer

This comic was supported in part by the Tran Thi Oanh Fund.

The Election of 14 September

Office Romance

Instant Coffee in Domiz

While on assignment between 2013 and 2017, often for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Olivier Kugler interviewed and photographed Syrian refugees and their caregivers in camps, on the road, and in provisional housing. His new book Escaping Wars and Waves, co-published by Penn State University Press and Myriad Editions, is the astonishing result of that record-keeping—a graphic novel that brings to life the improvised living conditions of the refugees, along with the stories of how they survived. Olivier’s work has……

Herzog Park Ranger

Great Moments on the Loo

What Could Go Wrong / What Could Go Right

All-Ages Music

Pervical Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier

In his 2001 novel Erasure, Percival Everett conjured up the unforgettable Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a middle-class writer of challenging fiction who enjoys a decidedly quiet (think polite applause) career until, fed up with a publishing industry and reading public interested only in “authentic” black voices and “authentic” black experience, he writes a pseudonymous send up of street fiction that he thinks is absurd and that the rest of the world thinks is genius.  In the wake of this gambit, he……

The 2006 World Cup Meta-Headbutt