America Dads: Louis CK and Barack Obama
...culture—television evolved the particular kinds of narrative genres that it did by reference to the developing new forms of “normal” social life, a form of social life in which father...
Terrifying Robot Update: Tuesday, January 5, 2016
...kind of material critique of gendered labor, it will just put a bunch of women out of work. • • • Kill it kill it kill it kill it...
Media is Better Police
...Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Police don’t kill people either, and that’s because, when it comes down to it, police are more guns than people, objects not only...
Sunday Reading: October 15, 2023
...articles, and they will be published here within the newsletter and at the Sunday Reading blog. Please pitch us with drafts attached at [email protected]. That is also the email to...
Keeping Kayfabe
...combined with a tried and true strategy to work an audience. But that official explanation ignores that the entire history of wrestling is the history of monopolistic collusion. This is...
Louder Than Bombs
...I was wrapped in bandages. I tried to move them, but I couldn’t, so I asked, “Did you cut off my legs?” They said no, but I kind of knew....
more tired, more frustrated, more rotten
...she tried to theorize--using a familiar set of theoretical texts and continental philosophers--how and where and why some kinds of life become “grievable” while others do not. When Israeli children...
Miracles and Wonder, Faith and Diaspora: On Tope Folarin's "Miracle"
...a literary commodity. It can help bring people together, help them live at peace with each other, and it can even teach us useful ways of living in the world....
The Oceanic Feeling
...of love, a redemptive love that won’t quite fit into the comforting melodic or narrative resolution of pop culture. We heard strains of such a love on Ocean’s performance at...
Up for debate
Reflections from the TERF wars about dismantling bigotry on the left
Continental Drift
...of 1935, in Csikvánd, a tiny village in northwestern Hungary. Her father was a teacher in the local school, but was imprisoned in 1949 by the new Communist government, when...
The City that Care Remembered
...who came in charity. I’ve been thinking about how anti-Black violence is still a wingnut idea to many people. “The government tried to kill 100,000 Black people in New Orleans.”...
Hi Haters!
...appreciative “fans,” to use Marwick’s word. But that seems to falsely imply microfame exhibitionism stems from delusions of grandeur. Valences drawn from celebrity culture and discourse may help suppress the...
The Fight and the Whale
...helped shape and reshape rock music. Reed didn't need to hire a famous artist to do the cover of his first record, because THE MOST FAMOUS ARTIST ON THE PLANET...
Sunday Reading
...culture is reshaped by class hierarchies." Race, disability, and the school-to-prison pipeline Student debtors slide deeper into peonage College is a promise the economy doesn't keep "As a professor who...
What Even Can You Even Say About The Princess-Man of North Sudan?
...his culture has programmed him to do: he is performing patriarchal whiteness using the convenient props provided by “Africa” as a space of negation. If your heroes are George Washington...