The Labor of Performance (Part Two)
...endearment. The Paris Opera Ballet commissioned a documentary about Doisneau from Bel, a "low-rank" dancer a week away from retiring after a 20-year career. The evening of her last performance...
Dynamite at the police parade and other comic situations
...of the chase, their potentially surprising, and necessarily hostile, properties: chests that don’t contain what is inside, bleachers ready to topple, a light for your smoke with a bomb attached,...
Old Bones
...history of colonialism, science was a major legitimization agent. Why do you think it had to be dinosaurs and not, say, Ice Age megafauna, the mammals that humans did actually...
Ghosts
To tell the stories of a blackqueer heartbreak and forestalled nostalgia provoked by the Disney Channel is to draw energy from a ghosting of severed connections, an otherwise movement of unnamed but present intimacies
Placebos and Noisy Bodies
...tight and/or non-cotton clothing. My life at the time, unfortunately, seemed to contain only those things. At the cleaning service where I work, clients wanted thorough spring-cleans of their filthy...
Amniotechnics
...that fetuses (themselves full of parasites and symbionts) distinguish themselves. They do so brutally. Whereas in most species the mother’s safety comes first by default, in humans it is very...
En passant
...in Computer Chess: Are the humans passing as machines, or the machines passing as humans? How much of emotional connection is simply the simulation of it? When machines can feel,...
Lost in the Supermarket
...set about replacing expensive missile computers with expendable humans. Among humanity’s greatest fears when it comes to the adoption of tools is that we will become dependent and forget how...
Hanford Idyll
...the first two decades of the site’s operations to contain the waste from plutonium production until a more permanent solution could be found. Nearly 70 have leaked, and some of...
A Cute Idea
...(or paranoid) moments, the characters chatter about the digital protocols to which they are submitted as fluently as today’s humans might complain of a life-sucking job. Through aphorisms poised between...
The Evil to Come
For a brief moment, each one of us saw the possibility of the end of capitalism rather than the end of the world
Dating robots
...ideologically. But if you are ideologically committed to the postulate of artificial intelligence and insist that robots will be able to do anything humans can do, as David Levy does...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Solid Personal Achievements
...she’s human, just human, and sometimes humans are jerks. Last year, I had the good fortune to interview Adichie herself, in the bar of her hotel in San Francisco where...
Lying Like Cuttlefish
...and pass on their genetic material. Videos that demonstrate all of this are widely available on Youtube. You can spend hours watching cuttlefish deceive the eyes of humans, predators, prey...
Joe Cool
...awarded with publicity from the Aldi feed. The consumer endorses the brand, and in turn the brand validates the consumer. The opportunities for this quasi-reciprocal participation in brands is presumed...
Enigma Deviations
...answer would probably depend on whether or not such reflexive activity is common among humans. Duplicitous or part-hidden subjects, such as spies or queers, have long had to know a...