Athletic Aesthetics
...promise of Rate/Comment/Subscribe! culture is that viewers can engage in a more direct form of fandom, in which their tributary comments and reblogs are directly acknowledged by artists and eventually...
Shades of Sovereignty
...programs. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security announced an analogous “outreach” effort; they subsequently sent an envoy to Boston to teach Muslim community groups how to better recognize extremist...
Kill the Philosopher in Your Head
...Or rather, he was upset that the students on the streets in Paris ’68 told you there was one there to kill, so much so that he wanted their slogan...
Not for Prophet
...few entry points: a) TWC’s label, The Weather Channel Music, has released close to a dozen compilations of “Local on the 8s” songs. b) The Weather Channel Presents: The Best...
Black Arts Boomerang
...present moment a Black Arts Boomerang. We have yet to close the gap between street actions and popular culture, personal and social liberations, but bridges are being built and traversed...
Sunday Reading: June 4, 2023
...song. “In practical terms,” Brooks writes,” the camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening were the first American music festivals…. This is where the idea that pop songs can save...
Baby Heists
For the last half century, the international adoption of orphans has been used to cast imperial warfare and extraction as humanitarianism
Private Pornography
...kind of theory? About patterns in culture, gender, sexuality, shame, desire... everything really. There are many writers in your stories, self-professed; could you talk a little bit about that? Sontag...
Of Suicide
...dignity, nor deliberation. “Crime of Passion, Your Honor,” I’d tell the judge, “it was manslaughter.” I’ve tried to kill myself twice. I feel a twinge of disingenuousness even writing that,...
Black Metal Is Sublime
...Given the relentlessness of Black Metal music, the showy necro-Baroqueness of Black Metal fashion and the hyper-masculinity of Black Metal comportment, absolute outwardness seems an apt characterization. The Romantic sublime...
Conspicuous Consumption
...their weakness for flesh. If we never plan to return to veganism, Exvegans.com requested that we please kill ourselves. In one respect, there was something for ex-vegans to like about...
Fan Nonfiction
Heroic tales about video-game production mask how the hobby holds both its audience and performers captive
A Conspiracy Between the Far-Right and the #J20 Prosecutions
The prosecution’s strategy to convict anti-Trump protesters, medics, journalists and dissidents reveals how much white nationalists have seized institutional power
Bikini, Kill
...a recurring motif). Later, the camera closes in on its protagonists and the curves of their thighs, their bra cups. The movie operates on a standard tenet of our culture:...
Do No Harm
...place. Sarah Ahmed calls the “melancholic migrant” a “ghostly figure, haunting contemporary culture as a kind of unnecessary and hurtful reminder of racism.” Her argument is more complicated than that,...
Don't Be a Stranger
...where a few dozen mostly twenty-somethings traded music recommendations and outlandish project ideas. At the time I was making stupid comedy videos and I’d share them with Urban Honking as...