James Meyer – författare

Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet''s dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers", individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet''s generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close.Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet''s dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers", individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet''s generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close.Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers", individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close.Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

More than any other decade, the Sixties captures our collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King, Jr. declaring, "I Have A Dream," or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels while staring down the National Guard, the revolutionary Sixties resonate around the world: China's communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the brutality of the Vietnam War.In this highly original work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long Sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, Cai Guo-Qiang's reconstructions of an iconic Cultural Revolution-era sculpture, and the television series Mad Men, to name only a few. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties, who are driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history, whether dark or glowingly nostalgic, never perfectly replicates time passed. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us with a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

A groundbreaking examination of the “double” in modern and contemporary artFrom ancient mythology to contemporary cinema, the motif of the double—which repeats, duplicates, mirrors, inverts, splits, and reenacts—has captured our imaginations, both attracting and repelling us. The Double examines this essential concept through the lens of art, from modernism to contemporary practice—from the paired paintings of Henri Matisse and Arshile Gorky, to the double line works of Piet Mondrian and Marlow Moss, to Eva Hesse’s One More Than One, Lorna Simpson’s Two Necklines, Roni Horn’s Pair Objects, and Rashid Johnson’s The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett). James Meyer’s survey text explores four modes of doubling: Seeing Double through repetition; Reversal, the inversion or mirroring of an image or form; Dilemma, the staging of an absurd or impossible choice; and the Divided and Doubled Self (split and shadowed selves, personae, fraternal doubles, and pairs). Thought-provoking essays by leading scholars Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tom Gunning, W.J.T. Mitchell, Hillel Schwartz, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Andrew Solomon discuss a host of topics, including the ontology and ethics of the double, the double and psychoanalysis, double consciousness, the doppelgänger in silent cinema, and the queer double.Richly illustrated throughout, The Double is a multifaceted exploration of an enduring theme in art, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, video, and performance.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DCExhibition ScheduleNational Gallery of Art, Washington, DCJuly 10–October 31, 2022

Walk through a grocery store with an economist and they see price signals encoding weather patterns, labor negotiations, and currency fluctuation in a single banana sticker. Walk through with a psychologist and they see how the store is quietly manipulating your path, your pace, and your appetite.Both are right. Both are seeing something real that the other misses.This Is Not a Banana gives you another lens that most people never get access to.For seventy years, Computer Science has been solving one problem above all others: how do you take a system so complex that no single human can understand it, and make it work anyway? The answers: abstraction, interfaces, protocols, were built for software. But they illuminate something much older: the hidden architecture underneath every system human beings have ever built.This is not a book about writing code. It is a book about finally being able to read the world.You will learn why:The person at the DMV counter has to be cold — and why the small victory you win from her is a cost quietly passed to everyone who followed the rules and went home without a storyThe couple who tried to renovate the whole house at once ran out of marriage before they ran out of houseYour parents still treat you like you are twelve — and why a single grand gesture is almost never enough to update the mental model someone holds of youPolite people cause traffic jams, and someone has to be "e;rude"e; to get the system moving againCity Hall sends you in circles — and how institutions are architecturally designed to transfer the cost of their broken processes onto youThe anxious thought you cannot stop replaying is behaving exactly like unfreed memory, and what it takes to finally trigger the releaseOnce you have this lens, you cannot put it down. You will see the hidden blueprint in a grocery store, a bureaucracy, a difficult relationship, a stalled organization. You will understand not just that systems fail, but why — and who was quietly chosen to pay the cost when they do.The world will not change. But your ability to read it will.For readers of Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Slow, and Algorithms to Live By.