Swedish enfant terrible Anna Odell uses personal experience in her films to dramatic real-life effect.
In 2009, she first made a name for herself with Unknown, Woman 2009-349701 (Okänd, kvinna 2009-349701), her final art school project, where she staged and filmed a documentary of a psychological breakdown and suicide attempt at Liljeholmsbron, a central bridge in Stockholm, to invite public discourse on mental illness and psychiatric practices in Sweden. In addition to incurring a fine and a conviction for violent resistance to police arrest, fraudulent practice and making a false alarm, Odell became the subject of media scrutiny and public debate.
As work subsumes leisure time, worldwide anxieties mount, and a pandemic reshapes comfort and togetherness, meditation has been touted as a panacea. People who are stressed out (are there any other kind?) can take a meditation course, read an article, go on a retreat, or use an app; the hope is to gain from meditation peace, health, productivity, focus, or a good night’s sleep. It comes almost universally recommended and has precious few public detractors.
David Kortava’s article “Lost in Thought,” from the April issue of
Harper’s Magazine, is an investigation into the possible negative side effects of meditation. Kortava reports on a practitioner’s bout with psychosis during an extended stay at a vipassana meditation center that had her wishing for death. Kortava presents evidence of meditation’s potential to distress and harm. In this episode of the podcast,
The photographer Richard Rothman spent more than a decade taking pictures in a small town along the Front Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The resulting monograph,
Town of C
, was published by Stanley/Barker, and a selection of the photographs appears in the March issue of
Harper’s Magazine
. The book’s scope is comprehensive, documenting the grandeur and the despoliation of the region’s geography and the lives and spaces of its poorest and richest residents. “Through portraits and landscapes,” the critic and curator Lyle Rexer writes in his introduction, “Rothman presents the paradox of expansiveness and confinement, of possibility and crushing limitation.”
“S
ous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the pavement, the beach!”) was the rallying cry of the May 1968 protests in France. As demonstrators tore up paving stones in order to build barricades or to hurl at the police, they discovered that there was sand beneath the streets. Though this was a typical building practice, it reinforced the protesters’ belief that everyday life wasn’t quite what it appeared to be, but was rather an illusion manufactured by modernity, capitalism, and consumerism. During the early months of the pandemic, we were all confronted with the same truth. The levels of noise, garbage, and greenhouse-gas emissions pumped into the environment were drastically reduced because so many schools, workplaces, and restaurants were shuttered. Just as people abruptly changed where and how they spent their days, all sorts of wildlife began venturing into public places they’d previously avoided: deer roamed the streets of Paris while coyotes wandered around San F
This month will see the release of Blake Bailey’s
Philip Roth: The Biography the authorized biography of the famous novelist, who died in 2018. Roth himself selected Bailey to write his life story. In addition to many long conversations, Roth granted Bailey complete access to his personal archives and helped set up interviews with many of his friends, lovers, and colleagues.
In the March issue of
Harper’s Magazine, the novelist and
Harper’s contributing editor Joshua Cohen imagines how Bailey’s book might be received by Roth himself. From the comfort of his writing studio beyond the grave, Cohen’s Roth ruminates on the strange, perhaps self-destructive decision to commission his own biography, and proceeds to lament the result, which, he argues, downplays the literary production that made up most of his days (“MY BIOGRAPHER HAS NO INTEREST IN MY WRITING!!!!”) in favor of “interminable chapters and decades of reputation management, alternating with, if not relie