Mitchell 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 […]

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Photo 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 […]

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Early 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.

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  Ben Carson may be a renowned doctor, but even he cannot perform surgery on history. When the soft-spoken Islamophobic surgeon, critic of the modern civil-rights movement and top contender for the Republican presidential nomination, appeared on Fox News Channel’s Media Buzz as he began to climb in the polls, he declared that the GOP […]

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  Exceptional, the new book from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, is not. It is nothing more than an unhinged rant that smacks of sedition. “The children need to know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender,” the […]

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