Christopher Hitchens and Fights Worth Having
You can smell the cigarette ash and Johnnie Walker Black Label on the pages of A Hitch in Time, a gleefully pugilistic posthumous Christopher Hitchens anthology.
Politics
Trapped in the Long Tomorrow: ‘Blade Runner’, Cyberpunk, and Our Stuck Future
Blade Runner serves our vision of an inevitable dystopian future because we live in a “stuck future”, refusing to heed cyberpunk’s warning.
The Alt-Right’s Roots Go Deep in Co-Opting Pop Music
As with the Nazis and Goebbels and the Ku Klux Klan, the alt-right’s desire to co-opt pop music for their purposes requires ideological and ethical gymnastics.
Meghan Markle’s ‘Archetypes’: A Platform Stuck in Beta?
With the end of her Archetypes podcast, Meghan Markle’s first exposure to the meritocracy of the customer has been cruel.
The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Punk Got Co-opted by Fascism
Like political populism, punk’s traits and tenets are sufficiently vague, contradictory, and unmoored to be vulnerable to co-option by all political opportunists—including the fascist alt-right.
‘Conflict Graffiti’ and the Artists That Use Public Spaces for Public Discourse
Situating his study at sites of conflict and interviewing artists, scholar John Lennon’s Conflict Graffiti gives readers new perspectives for interpreting the graffiti and street art they encounter.
Work or Die? ‘Death Panel’ Podcasters Propose ‘Health Communism’
Death Panel podcasters and Health Communism authors argue that the unemployed, maligned, “burdens” of the state are essential to capitalism’s ill-gotten profit.
Could Longtermism Cause Short-Term Damage?
William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future is an audacious plea to help our future humans with longtermism thinking, but it is blind to what we need now.
Why Do Voters Want Women Candidates to Be Like Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope?
Ten years after Parks and Recreation’s campaign-focused season 4, real-world female political candidates still liken themselves to Leslie Knope. Is that the kind of candidate 2022 needs?
The Making of Our “Viral Underclass”
The Viral Underclass digs into capitalism, Big Pharma, “Gay-Inc.” and other factors surrounding Covid-19 and HIV that force a greater toll on the already marginalized.