Black President
...that popular culture will always orient itself toward the president, although sometimes it’s a more powerful orientation than other times. The only thing that happened when Bush was president was...
Spy vs. History
...Vietnam, there’s no real hope of parity; The Sympathizer is up against a much greater volume of weaponized culture. The spy models that difficulty while working as a technical consultant...
Vol. 31 Editor's Note: Mourning
...In an interview with historian Thomas Laqueur, Hannah Black floats the idea that human culture itself can be thought of as an elaborate work of mourning, our lives beholden to...
Unacceptable Bodies
...cases, Ashley’s case illustrates that the very language we use to describe and justify medical and ethical decision making comes from and reinforces a culture of medicalization. Key to creating...
Data Occupations
...one thing a community with such strong roots in maker culture is not good at, it’s obediently following directions and obliging designers’ intentions: To thine own self be true. Quantified...
Twilight of the Mentors
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my gatekeeper
Pretty/Funny (Guest Post)
...MNN Lifestyle Channel October 3 at 2 p.m., and on MNN’s Culture Channel October 7 at 10:30. It will also be live-streamed on MNN.org during those times. (And if you...
TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism
...Death of the Player •Celia Pearce & Friends: Experimental Game Design • • • Straight White Males: Video Game Media and Gaming Culture •Maddy Myers: Gaming, rape culture, and how...
St. Cthulu in the Anthroposcene
...How does such a definition come to take hold, when the culture it emerges from is filled with very explicit accounts of horror, from the zombie film to the serial...
Lessons From a New History of ACT UP: An Interview with Sarah Schulman
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power began as a revolutionary liberation movement––so what happened?
Plantation Neoliberalism
...opposite direction.” It is, in other words, a flight from reconstituted plantations to somewhere else, a refusal of work and work’s culture whose negative movement opens space for something new....
Reader's Digest
...A Review of Balzac’s Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac So strange and hectic a phantasmagoria were the streets of the...
Anti-Fascisting
“None of us, under capitalism, can claim to be wholly free of fascism.” An interview with Natasha Lennard.
Artistic autonomy and subsumption
...a feeling of autonomy? What does it even matter if an artwork is autonomous? Doesn't that just mean that the culture has succeeded in depoliticizing it? Is autonomy a form...
In Defense of Looting
...Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown’s character and justify his killing post facto. It is a completely righteous and understandable position. However,...
Hurt People
The state cannot destroy us the way we destroy each other