Speak/Now
...an attempt to contain the fundamental uncertainty of language by pretending it can be dismissed as a derivative feature of writing. “Speak Now” is such a perfectly Derridean title because...
Gendered Observation: The Contribution of Women to the Astronomical Diaries of Mesopotamia
...a year with the aid of little more than a water clock for timing. Eventually, the content of the diaries standardized to contain information on what Francesca Rochberg-Halton describes as...
Digressions of an Opium-Eater
...sometimes directly, India’s wrenching transformation into a globalized post-modernity. If the addict is socially synecdochic, and if Narcopolis’s addicts often mirror particular moments of East Asian history, they also contain...
How Contempt Became a Genre
On Kevin Young’s Bunk and America’s seething tendencies
Misery Loves Company
In László Krasznahorkai’s latest work, the apocalypse has arrived and we’re living in it.
Myth of the Garbage Patch
...mind that the bunker oil fueling those ships and the processed petroleum in that strawberry container might have been mined by the same London-based oil company, and harder still to...
Sunday Reading
...humans find honey Education, Inc. If Humans Evolved to Survive Car Crashes Revenge against elites Situational Awareness First Annual Apologise to China Contest 21st Century French Colonialism Reclaim UC: Broken...
Border Theories
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
I Want to Believe
...wiping them out. Beheading the king, as they say, we maintained that this process is not exactly executed by, but more specifically through humans, whom it forms as subjects through...
The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock
...loves it. That humans are animals means it is possible that the animal model of inescapable shock explains why humans go to movies, lovers stay with those who don’t love...
The Ladies Vanish
...actually improve computers. When a turker works on a project, she creates a data set which the computer can then learn from. “Computers document the signals generated by humans. They...
Trespassing Horizons
Reflections on cybernetics as an ideology of organized oblivion
Riot Grrrls in Space
...selfish, callow, immature, and just plain dumb, much like actual humans. But they were also free to grow and mature in ways that corporate-owned comic-book characters could not and still...
Let Them Drink Blood
...the flesh, humans will enter a deathless realm. Lower life forms--plants, animals and unregenerate humans--will be left behind, or else eradicated. All that will remain will be the “pure thought”...
Desiring Machines
...by-products of the increasingly symbiotic relationships between humans, machines, and other possibly sentient objects. That’s all the microblog could do for now; it didn’t speak these other objects’ languages —...
My Soul to Keep
...the same time indispensable, humans stand in need of an upgrade if this machine is to realize its promise. The military has its work cut out for it. Crary writes...