Radar LARB

Cirocco Dunlap's "Literary Genre Translations": "Original Text: 'I ate a sandwich and looked out the window.' Sci Fi text: 'I placed the allotted nutrition capsules on my tongue bed and looked to the Nahin VI-8373 space podhole.'"

Adam Penenberg on "The Next Great Media Form": "The MP3 of journalism may be the "live blog," which relies on the merging of platforms and weaving of text with video, audio, external links to other articles (including those of rival news organizations), blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, and whatever other useful information is available."

Tom Lamont on Alan Moore, the comic-book writer behind the protest mask: "Moore has been caught off-guard in recent years, and particularly in 2011, by the inescapable presence of a certain mask being worn at protests around the world. A sallow, smirking likeness of Guy Fawkes – created by Moore and the artist David Lloyd for their 1982 series V for Vendetta."

Jenny Turner on the current state of feminism: "Feminism... has been ‘disarticulated’ and ‘undone’, bits pulled out, reworked and retwisted, and other bits dumped. At the moment, the popular elements include ‘empowerment’, ‘choice’, ‘freedom’ and, above all, ‘economic capacity’ – the basic no-frills neoliberal package. It’s fine for any ‘pleasingly lively, capable and becoming young woman’ to aspire to this. It doesn’t matter if she’s black or white or mixed race or Asian, gay or straight or basically anything, so long as she is hard-working, upbeat, dedicated to self-fashioning, and happy to be photographed clutching her A-level certificate in the Daily Mail. This young woman has been sold a deal, a ‘settlement’. So long as she works hard and doesn’t throw bricks or ask awkward questions, she can have as many qualifications and abortions and pairs of shoes as she likes."

Marilynne Robinson answers the 1939 Partisan Review questionnaire: "So as Americans we need to stop irrational attacks on our own government, at the same time that we find some way to hold it to the standards of dignity and integrity we and the world have a right to demand of it. Because if democracy does indeed lose prestige, these crowds, wherever they are, will turn into warring factions, falling into chaos that will seem to justify new repression. Needless to say, responsibility for the state of the world would ideally be felt by people in positions of influence in the media."