Hello and welcome back to The Span, Defector’s unparalleled culture newsletter. This week, we’re featuring the new with the old, including a debut novel that offers a contemporary take on an established genre, two famous paintings being exhibited together for the first time, a failed attempt at updating hockey culture, and a thrillingly modern and sexy approach to iambic pentameter.
Plus, this week marks the release of a new book by Defector’s very own Justin Ellis. More on that below!
Here are some cool blogs from Defector:
‘New Skin’ Offers A Fresh Take On Body Horror
Sarah Wang wades into the culture wars with her own fictional take on facelifts, race, and desirability.
Misery And Memory In Two Van Goghs
There are two Van Goghs in this exhibition: the blue and the yellow, yes, but also the man who existed before and the man who survived himself.
‘Off Campus’ Can’t Sell The Hockey Player Fantasy
Kennedy, and the show writers, want to have it both ways: the danger of a hockey bad boy with the veneer of female empowerment.
Cat Fitzpatrick On Writing Transsexuals Into Iambic Pentameter
Although a rhyming transsexual remake of a Socratic dialogue might seem a surprising combination, The Dinner Party is right at home in Fitzpatrick's body of work.
Here are some cool blogs from elsewhere on the internet:
Why Music Critics Have Olivia Rodrigo’s New Album Backwards
An essay on how Olivia Rodrigo subverts the typical anxiety of influence.
Last night, many members of the Defector staff gathered at the McNally Jackson down by the seaport in Manhattan to celebrate our own Justin Ellis, whose first book The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is the Story of America, came out on Tuesday. Justin wore a beautiful green linen suit, and eloquently spoke about working with primary sources and what a non-fiction book can and should do. Afterward, there was a little party with a cake that had the book cover on it and tequila shots!
Since you probably missed the very fun release event and party, we hope you will enjoy this interview Justin did with Maitreyi about his work:
Justin Ellis TELLS ALL About Minneapolis Life In This EXCLUSIVE Interview
In late 2020, months after the murder of George Floyd, our colleague Justin Ellis moved back to his hometown of Minneapolis to begin work on a book about black life in the city, where promises of racial harmony have gone unkept to generations of black residents. The city's good, neighborly intentions are alluded to in that classic phrase, Minnesota nice. "But good intentions find a way to devastate Black lives all the same," Justin writes. His brilliant new book, The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is the Story of America, is in bookstores now. It asks readers to consider what nice really means. Floyd's death, Justin writes, is less a departure from nice than a consequence of nice, a culmination of too many conversations avoided and too many problems swept under the rug.