Escape Velocity
When we're used to traveling at the speed of data, what do passenger jets have left to offer?
A Game Is Being Beaten
The trend in video game design is to comment on violence by asking players to perform violence. But could there be pleasure in performing consent?
Consciously or Unconsciously
Is the infamous white-supremacist novel The Turner Diaries a real threat, or just a shitty book for shitty people?
Black Metal Is Sublime
In their propensity for corpse paint and murder, bands like Bathory and Gorgoroth are the unlikely fulfillment of Romantic ideals: absolute inwardness turned outward
Sparkle, Shirley, Sparkle!
An orphaned moppet in pursuit of a daddy, a pet in search of a warm lap, no one is more a child than Shirley Temple losing value
Body Mass Index
When Sandra Bullock undresses in Gravity, she reveals less a body than a machine
The Bitter Women of Japanese Noir
Modern Japanese crime thrillers give a seamy voice to societal discontent
Romancing the Archive
A new Trinidadian novel tries a new approach to the traditionally vexed Carribean relationship to history
Everybody's Doing It
Peer pressure has dissipated since its ’90s heyday, but the adolescent flat world is harder to navigate
Eminent Domain
The .art generic top-level domain threatens to undermine the gallery system — if curators don't get it first
Next Year in Tehran
An Iranian intellectual's trip to Israel in the 1960s revealed the strange appeal of secular republicanism to religious ethno-supremacists.
As Goes Naples
The disastrous, corrupt "recovery" of war-shattered Naples in Curzio Malaparte's The Skin reflects the rot at the core of the European peace
Teaching While Black
If race is a construct, gender is a construct, and teaching is a performative act, where and how do I exist in the classroom as a real black woman?
Reason Displaces All Love
Libidinal economizing in the early Soviet Union
Dating in the Expanded Field
Dating has left behind the modernist binaries that once defined it. To survey the field we now face, we need a map.
Kill the Philosopher in Your Head
Althusserianism has always been a Marxism for those who prefer their class struggle as philosophy