Invasions
One of the charms of Star Wars was the contrast of robots and serfs, space ships and lords. High technology and feudalism. If you follow US politics (don’t, it’...
Category: power
politics, history, force
Wheels of fortune
Smart people become irrational around technology. We want absolutes, purity and simple answers; whether it’s being anti-GMO or bullish on AI, the impulse ...
Pleasure and power
Casamigos, Doritos marketing collateral, 2018 A consistent theme in the marketing of Mexico’s grastronomic culture is the erasure of Mexicans. When Mexica...
Motherhood and the workplace
The movie Arrival (2016) and the movie Alien (1979) are contrasting takes on motherhood and women in the workplace. In Arrival, a successful professional woman ...
Legal or illegal, capital or labor
“You’ll get beautiful coverage, believe me, and the Mexicans will pay for it.” – Jeet Heer This tweet is comedy because “and the Mexicans will...
Facebook users deserve all their feels.
Facebook is software for managing your feelings. It promises to be a tool for strengthening relationships – primarily, as a replacement for email – but it is en...
Who are the architects?
A curious turn of phrase from Robert Gates as reported by David Ignatius: “We’ve never had a populist movement or political insurgency quite like this — that ac...
diagnosis
the diagnosis of “mentally ill” is often used to strip people of their liberty. by governments and by family members, alike. we Americans don’...
The industry of memory
On The Sympathizer: Charlie Rose: You talk about the industry of memory. What’s that? Viet Thanh Nguyen: Well, we like to think that our memories are all ...
tired of winning
David Segal reviewing Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany: By 1944, the doctor had trouble finding veins to shoot. Then, as the Allies bombed th...
Anxiety, Conspiracy
Kimberly Guiler on Turkey, ourselves: Political attitudes are most malleable when prevailing conditions threaten people’s economic or personal security and caus...
China 2016, USA 2020
Christina Xu: Contrary to popular sentiment in the US, Chinese readers don’t blindly trust the state-run media. Rather, they distrust it so much that they don’t...
the hyperreality TV star who became president
From a masterful polemic by Brian Phillips: Authoritarianism wants to convince its supporters that nothing is true, that the whole machinery of truth is an into...
the carnivalesque and Trump rallies
In addition to being campaign events for an institutional political party and its candidate for POTUS, rallies can also be carnivals. links and citations below....
those who look for a world war will find it
Adam Gopnik: What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to it...
keeping the hamsters alive: clickbait and the information market
google just served me up the following “news” without knowing my full identity: this appears to be their default offering for an English speaker in ...
the stories that win
John Cassidy: To get people to turn out and vote in your favor, you also have to give them something positive to rally behind. The Leave campaign, for all its l...
maximum efficiency, minimum effort
Josh Marshall: As Clinton and her team certainly anticipated, hitting him hard as mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency has placed Trump in a sort of C...
Young Americans, old Americans
Jamelle Bouie This election isn’t just a fight over tax plans and health care; it’s a contest—a brawl, even—over questions of national identity. Just who is the...