Bill Caraher I’m totally enamored with J. Borgerson’s and J. Schroeder’s Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America (2017) published by MIT Press. The book explores the remarkable world of album covers from the 1950s and 1960s not from the heights of pop music (which was still dominated
For the last decade or so, I’ve had a fascination with parapsychology. Some of this stems from the work that I did on dream archaeology many years ago and some comes from puerile fascination with things like Jon Ronson’s Men who Stare at Goats. So, I couldn’t resist reading Wladimir Velminski’s
Sharon Carson This week NDQ is very pleased to give a nod to our neighbors at Minnesota Public Radio, specifically to producers Stephen Smith and Kate Ellis of American RadioWorks/American Public Media Reports for their fascinating documentary “White House Tapes: The President Calling,” which aired over the Presidents Day holiday
Over the holiday break, I read David Sax’s Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (Public Affairs 2016). It’s a popular book and Sax is a journalist who write on culture and technologies for a range of periodicals. His book was intriguing to me not because he
Sharon Carson North Dakota Quarterly is proud to honor the legacy of the Black Civil Rights movement this week, in recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and in honor of the thousands of citizens who labored long and hard (and labor long and hard today) to achieve racial and
Sharon Carson Our thoughts are with colleagues and friends in Istanbul and Turkey this week. Coincidentally, NDQ had planned a Short Take post for today on an intriguing project working with acoustic “spatial” reconstruction and representation of Byzantine era liturgical music in Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya in Turkish). Hagia Sophia is
By William Caraher Peter Marcuse’s and David J. Madden’s In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (Verso 2016) is a elegant survey of issues facing housing on a global scale. For the authors, the contemporary housing crisis exists in the tension between housing as home and housing as a
Sharon Carson It is no exaggeration to say that history is being made along the Missouri River in North Dakota right now, as the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s legal and political stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) has been endorsed by tribal nations across North America, while the on-the-ground
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers…” Bayard Rustin In his still remarkably relevant 1927 book The Public and Its Problems, American philosopher John Dewey said this about art: “…The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.” This
Bill Caraher Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora. New York: Orbit Publishing 2015. It’s summertime and many of us are traveling. I’m in Cyprus and Greece and NDQ’s other editor is in Germany. In fact, a “high-level editorial correspondence” (is this really a thing?) preceding this review involved travel delays, complications, and
