Cultural Self-Aggrandizement Has Us ‘Playing Oppression’
In Playing Oppression, scholars Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson lay bare the colonialist origins of board games.
Academia
McKenzie Wark’s ‘Raving’ and the Need to Dissociate from the Body and Self
McKenzie Wark’s understanding of ravespace as a constructed situation in nonlinear ketamine-time comports with my experience raving on weekends as a freshman in college.
How to Read Lauren Berlant: ‘On The Inconvenience of Other People’
Lauren Berlant’s oeuvre provokes ambivalence. As with their posthumous collection On The Inconvenience of Other People I consume Berlant, and Berlant consumes me.
The Follies and Potentials of Higher Education: ‘The Real World of College’
The Real World of College offers a research-backed, level-headed, non-political assessment of higher education. It’s a breath of fresh air let in stuffy rooms.
Punk Literature 101: Recommended Readings
Stimulated by, then stimulating, certain writings, punk has been a change agent of literature, injecting energy and disruption into multiple genres.
Diana Ross Explored Black Music’s Rich History on ‘Red Hot Rhythm & Blues’
Thirty-five years ago, Red Hot Rhythm & Blues saw Diana Ross ambitiously and affectionately placing herself within the history of Black music.
Punk in the Classroom: Question Everything
Punk’s “question everything” attitude has always been suited to education, despite the forces that seek to contain its rabble-rousing trouble-making from the classroom.
The British ‘Idea of Europe’ Is Still a Mess
Shane Weller’s The Idea of Europe, hampered by an unconscious form of Euroscepticism, suggests that British critics are still not ready to listen to their neighbors.
Judge – or Let the Market Be the Judge
Michael W. Clune argues that a popular mantra about art – everyone’s judgment is equal – impedes our ability to imagine a world outside of the capitalist marketplace.
Seeing Through the Eyes of a Semiologist: A Tribute to Umberto Eco
Many of Eco’s observations read true in our hyperkinetic era of the Internet, the experience economy, the Disneyfication of entertainment, the mega-blockbuster.
Can Queer Studies Rescue American Universities?
Matt Brim's Poor Queer Studies underscores the impact of poorer disciplines and institutions, which often do more to translate and apply transformative intellectual ideas in the world than do their ivory-tower counterparts.
UbuWeb’s Kenneth Goldsmith Writes the Book on Internet Archiving
Kenneth Goldsmith's Duchamp Is My Lawyer, a tale of the creation and upkeep of the anti-internet internet, UbuWeb, is highly engaging and avoids the risk of ploughing down theoretical wormholes of limited interest.
