On February 25, an excerpt of a letter appeared on the taxidermy blog Ravishing Beasts, in which the writer confesses: “When I see taxidermy I get severe panic attacks. I have no idea why. It started when I was … Continue reading →

For most people (academic historians unfortunately included), the history of American popular music begins in the enormous cultural shifts that followed World War II. The story goes that American popular music developed alongside other post-war inventions such as the … Continue reading →

In the last mass extinction the Earth had seen, an asteroid collision blanketed the Earth in darkness and toxic fumes. First to fall were the prehistoric behemoths, their armor plating and fanged arsenals unexpectedly ineffectual against the suffocating darkness. … Continue reading →

About a quarter of the way through the first part of Don Quixote —after the windmills but before The Man who was Recklessly Curious —Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come upon an odd sound, “the sound of rhythmic pounding, … Continue reading →

Hip-hop can’t seem to escape its own history, and that’s probably a good thing. Two recent books on this multifaceted art form and its broader reverberations in American culture trace hip-hop’s path through the postindustrial twentieth century and into … Continue reading →

Listen as Chris Wiewiora reads from his issue #12 nonfiction piece “This is Tossing.”
We’re not responsible for the pizza you might order or the nostalgia you might as call up.

“A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world. A writer who is afraid is no true writer.” By the time she wrote this in 1937, Irmgard Keun knew a … Continue reading →

¨(Name)! Have a great day!¨ ¨Happy Birthday (insert nickname)!¨ (NAME)!!! Muchas Felicidades!!!!! ¨ Or, in Morse code, “HB2U”: …. -… ..— ..-
Countering our revulsion with Facebook´s mercurial privacy-settings is our fascination with the social economics of its Birthday … Continue reading →

It’s possible that you overlooked this item amid the recent rush of news, but while the world watched revolutions in the Middle East, the Japanese tsunami, and a Libyan civil war, a team of scientists claimed to have discovered … Continue reading →

Of the first generation of composers working through the aleatoric and performative impetus John Cage gave to music, and now known primarily for his radical innovations of the operatic genre, Robert Ashley’s most famous early composition is a piece … Continue reading →

Meddling, in colloquial terms, is not usually a good thing. There’s something threatening about it, something that suggests unwanted or unwarranted intrusions. To meddle is to complicate, to create or uncover tensions that may not have been visible before. … Continue reading →

Perhaps the major strand of opera scholarship in the last twenty years has been a turn toward studying social movements and contexts rather than simply studying composers. In this regard, the flood of recent work on aesthetic movements … Continue reading →

Alfred Hitchcock looms large in the minds of film scholars and enthusiasts alike. Primarily associated with the visual aspects of his films, however, Hitchcock’s work in both silent and sound cinema is marked by similarly radical innovations in the … Continue reading →

In an interview with her publisher, Danielle Dutton talks about the origins of her most recent novel: “In the wake of 9/11, I, like everyone else, was thinking a lot about America, about what we are, inasmuch as we … Continue reading →

Living in a city, contact with strangers is perpetual and, accordingly, often monotonous. But occasionally a contact will prove surprisingly fruitful.
In June 1983, the artist Sophie Calle finds an address book on the Rue des Martyrs in … Continue reading →

In a bed in Moscow in March of 1852, his nose covered by leeches, his backbone palpable through his shrunken stomach, attempting – as ordered by a fanatical priest – to starve the devil within him, a mad Gogol perishes … Continue reading →

“You never heard such sounds in your life,” boasts the website of ESP-Disk’, a wonderfully diverse, and perverse, record label that – having weathered a remarkably turbulent career of fits and starts, death and rebirth – is, against all … Continue reading →

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Swimming Home feels like a cliché. Set around a holiday villa on the south-eastern coast of France, it exposes British middle-class angst to glaring sunlight. The motifs of a conventional thriller are present and correct: a body in the pool … Continue reading →

Thanks to everyone who joined us at the Hideout for the MAKE 12 release party.
And special thanks to readers Tovah Burstein and Ted Mathys (pics soon!); interviewee Tim Samuelson; bands Like Pioneers and Soft Speaker; and our host Adam … Continue reading →

In their book on compulsory schooling, Gordon Cox and Robin Stevens cover those places across the world where, as Shakespeare’s Jacques puts it “all the men and women are merely players” – that is, those countries where music education finds … Continue reading →

“There were things under things, as well as things inside things.” Thus does H.D. — in this reprint of her classic twentieth-century memoir, Tribute to Freud — prove herself in one sweeping statement a true catechumen of the … Continue reading →

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Hello, friends,
A subscription is the gift that continues to remind your loved one of your genius and generosity. MAKE is produced lovingly in Chicago, looks amazing on a coffee table or bathroom rack, and is filled with the work of … Continue reading →

In December 1981, the French writer Pierre Guyotat entered a coma induced by the harsh rituals of fasting that had become an integral part of his writing ethic. He was 41 at the time, an age “which as a … Continue reading →

“We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house.” There is a peculiar sense … Continue reading →

The film journal Cahiers du cinéma is best known as the crucible in which the founders of the French New Wave – Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut – conceived the innovations … Continue reading →

According to Foucault: “from the point of view of the law that imposes it, public torture and execution must be spectacular; it must be seen by all almost as its triumph.” Yet as Larissa Tracy points out in … Continue reading →

Ann Beattie published her first story in The New Yorker in April 1974, when she was 26. In the story, a young woman leaves her husband, finds a roommate named Sam, and grows attached to his quiet, docile presence. Sam … Continue reading →

Wow, wait, we just released an issue with stories, poems, and essays in both Spanish and English. Also, there’s a full-color, double-sided poster accompanying. It kind of feels like we forgot to tell you. There were those three Exchange/Intercambio events … Continue reading →

Caleb Kelly’s Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction investigates the intersection of music, performance art, and sound studies in the object of media that has been “cracked.” “Cracked media” are, according to Kelly, “the tools of media playback expanded … Continue reading →

Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a 78-page rabbit hole of a novel. Written in 1968 and algorithmically structured – with accompanying flowchart, designed by Jacques Perriaud at the Computing Service of the Humanities … Continue reading →

The study of film music, despite its current popularity in both musicology and cinema studies, nevertheless remains a relatively new subject of analysis in both respective fields, and as such has been, arguably, lacking a definitive treatment. While some … Continue reading →

The beautiful #12 was completed on the heels on #13.  Since we already had events scheduled for #13, we’ve chosen print #12 in late November.  As an all-volunteer staff dedicated to publishing a quality magazine, we think this is in … Continue reading →

The text of the Old English poem known as Beowulf is frustratingly ambiguous from its very first word: Hwæt, a slippery and hard-to-translate expression often employed as an interjection, a call for people to quiet down at the start … Continue reading →

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In “On Exactitude in Science,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of a fictional empire so devoted to the art of cartography that its citizens constructed “a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire,” corresponding “point for point” … Continue reading →

Where Art Belongs, the latest volume by Chris Kraus – art critic, author, and editor at the influential publishing concern Semiotext(e) – is a loose confederation of thoughtful art-crit essays collected and published last year as a part of the … Continue reading →

Better late than….
Today’s New York Times discusses “Island Night” — my 12-hour nocturnal walk through Fire Island. nytimes.com/2012/09/07/nyr…
— Jon Cotner (@joncotner) September 7, 2012

03 was French writer Jean-Christophe Valtat’s English-language debut. It is a monologue in one 84-page paragraph, narrated by a writer looking back on his adolescence in a dispiriting French suburb, remembering his obsession with a mentally disabled girl he … Continue reading →

At the exact moment when England was entering the mature phase of capitalism and transforming into a technological industrial state, Percy Bysshe Shelley remarked: “we want the creative faculty to imagine what we know.” This longing – in response to … Continue reading →