Kevin Hilke
David Milch’s Deadwood lays bare the dynamic and discursive construction of subjective experience with unrivaled felicity, clarity, and skill. Milch’s characters emerge, shimmer, and recede too frenetically for us to pull back and examine them as complex wholes. We are instead absolutely stuck, with Deadwood’s inhabitants, in a state of constant, potent experiential flux. Radical contingency reigns, making moments of inexplicable terror and moments of astonishing grace equally likely and equally unpredictable.
Eric Freeman
How has a teenager in America never heard a Jay-Z song? No one will ever mistake Miley Cyrus’s bizarre concoction of country, pop, and Spears-style pre-legal come-ons for hip-hop, but her music occupies the same cultural sphere as Jay-Z. These are songs that people know. If she were a normal girl, she’d be going to Jay-Z concerts with her friends.
Megan Stacy
Those who deride this honor as an award of aspiration are missing the point. It’s not about what Obama hopes or intends to do; it’s about the hope and intention he inspires in others. It’s about changing the way people see the world and what the world can be and what the world can produce. There’s nothing wrong with honoring someone whose eloquence and prominence brought about a November night filled with mass gatherings of happy tears, shouts of glee, and hugs for strangers in the streets of Chicago, Kenyan villages, Indonesian hamlets, and towns across the world that see Barack Obama as a little bit of their own.
Eric Freeman
In their press release, the Nobel Committee says they gave Herta Müller this year’s Prize in Literature for how she, “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” I don’t think you can argue that the dispossessed’s landscape should not be depicted. The problem is that the Nobel Committee now only gives the Prize in Literature to people who write about this topic.
Kevin Hilke
Seinfeld’s declared motto was “No hugging, no learning,” but it’s come to be defined more frequently by its popular moniker, “the show about nothing.” Despite the moniker’s popularity and its proliferation as the conceptual foundation of the show, its motto ultimately captures the spirit of the show far better. Even and especially after the departure of co-creator Larry David after the seventh season, Seinfeld’s adherence to its “no hugging, no learning” directive became ever more stringent. All the stranger, then, that David himself returned to pen the series finale, in which the show’s theoretical underpinning, the possibility of a non-malicious indifference to the suffering of others generating comedy, is sternly rebuked.
