Anti-Fascisting
“None of us, under capitalism, can claim to be wholly free of fascism.” An interview with Natasha Lennard.
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?
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...
A Short History of the Dining Room (Part 1)
...music, and the company was already heated with wine; when the count retired for an instant, drew his sword, and gave the signal of the murder." --Edward Gibbon, The History...
Open Channels
...Sue/Marty Stu character. But Cho doesn’t stop at experimenting with different identities—aspects of his own subjectivity go with him, flooding the characters he inhabits. In “The Sound of Music,” for...
Paranoia lost
...can and probably should investigate anyone, rationalizing a social hermeneutics of suspicion through the provision of the means to execute it. Paranoia is built into the culture, to the extent...
Beauty Blogosphere 6.8.12
...the ways that we've transformed celebrities into objects. It's a case study of culture-wide objectification: "Listen, I enjoy pop culture. I like movies and television, and I like pop music,...
Hal
Delayed reflections on Jim Jarmusch and Talal Asad
Short Circuit
...for popular storytelling in the broad culture and hip storytelling among the cinerati. But for most of us, the film might as well be a tree falling in one of...
Sunday Reading
...the ambiguities of folklore, history, culture. Names, Trains, and Corporate Deals: Why Public Transit Shouldn’t Sell Naming Rights What to Read Next Batman wins the Cold War Not-quite-lost shadows Imperialistic...
The Devil’s Playground
On wondering over sexual memory, and the pressure to conform to dominant narratives of violation
Caruso Sings The Vowels
...The great Enrico Caruso taking us through the vowels as shown in Caruso's Method of Voice Production: the Scientific Culture of the Voice (1922) by Pasqual Mario Marafioti. When...
Sunday Reading: April 30, 2023
...Silicon Valley demonstrate how venture capital culture trained a generation of people to build and fund apps, not sustainable businesses––and then marry those apps to industries a lot more complex...
Groupthinkers
A review of Divining Desire (OR Books) by Liza Featherstone
Seconds of Pleasure
...distracting us. A culture of distraction doesn’t stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production. Distractions only...
The Job of Consent
The Joy of Consent: a Philosophy of Good Sex (October 2023) tests the limits of consent as a heuristic for "good sex," exposing the wide berth between pleasure and what is legible to the law.