Kitchen Sink

Has irony died a premature death? Why is Britney no Lolita? Has the hip-hop novel really come of age? Issue 11 of the fiendishly smart Kitchen Sink magazine offers provocative musings from a variety of writers on these very topics, plus much more. In some ways similar to highbrow culture magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, this Bay Area quarterly is literary and sophisticated—but with a definite left-coast casualness. It’s younger, cooler and more experimental. Kitchen Sink has the chutzpa to disregard any distinctions between high and low, underground and pop. It’s all on the same table, everything but the … well, you know. Among Issue 11’s highlights are a fun tale of drug smuggling in Myanmar told in a comic-book format and an academic analysis of rapper Ice Cube.