Category: Culture
13 Ways of Looking at Trump
by Dave Denison | Jun 29, 2016 | Media, PoliticsImage Credit: Marc Nozell Can anyone capture the essence of Donald Trump? What, if anything, is at his core? Journalists have been trying to define Trump ever since his rise to prominence in New York in the 1970s. And since his presidential campaign accelerated last fall, the takes on Trump have multiplied exponentially. There’s no […]
Sight Unseen
by Maya Binyam | Jun 9, 2016 | Books, PoliticsTrayvon Martin’s father Tracy Martin and mother Sybrina Fulton speak at a protest in New York City. Photo Credit: David Shankbone When George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, 2.7 million Americans had their eyes on LeBron James. It was the night of the NBA’s 2012 All-Star game. LeBron scored 36 points, with six rebounds and seven assists. […]
Blueprint for a Divided City
by Naomi Gordon-Loebl | Jun 1, 2016 | Books, PoliticsMitchell Duneier’s Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea is not so much a full history of the ghetto as a place as it is an intellectual history of those who have studied it. Duneier profiles four black social scientists and community leaders who engaged with the physical spaces frequently […]
Seeing Like a Burglar
by Jonathan Tarleton | May 19, 2016 | Books, PoliticsPhoto Credit: USGS Architectural determinism has a strange effect: under its auspices, behavior is attributed to brick and mortar. Towers sow violence and destitution, either by creating irresistible opportunities for crime or structuring life in such a way that social contracts continually rupture. The argument is at once both a perverse scapegoating and a peculiar […]
Strawberry Cubes Forever
by Cecilia D'Anastasio | May 18, 2016 | Culture, MediaEarly on the first day of New York’s IndieCade East, game developer Frank DeMarco carefully taped a bottle cap he’d found in the trash onto the keyboard of a STRAWBERRY CUBES’ arcade cabinet.
“It’s so players can’t press the escape button,” he explained, “and escape from the game.”
IndieCade East, a festival of independent games held April 29–May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image, was just starting to fill with game developers and fans. Here, video games with low budgets, or even generous ones unfettered from behemoth publishers, teased at gaming’s most well-trod tropes: first-person shooters, dungeon-crawlers, military strategy.