Reviving the spirit of revival
It can feel like listening to Spotify, reading this way. A patchy sampling, in which huge expanses of history are available but unintuitively organized, likely to result in having heard rarities and minor B-sides before getting the full feel of a band or a genre. But that’s no bad thing. In plenty of discographies, the rarities are the best parts.
How should we live in a rogue state?
The decay and disarray are our own, while China rockets humanity into the future.
It’s OK to be a Luddite!
The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.
If the government is good for business, why destroy the government?
Jameson’s work seemed to suggest that criticism might open a door to paradise.
Was this cynicism? Or a sign of Biden’s deeper estrangement from the world he has made?
We are not used to this — not to the gruesomeness, the ceaselessness, the direct address.
Surely it’s possible to say two things at the same time— to dwell in the uncertainty.
All this adds up to the impression that impressions are hard to come by.
Shittiness is a big tent — and the tent is falling apart.
The movement to criminalize abortion
Those who wish to ban legal abortion are not “pro-life”; they are pro-criminalization. Those who wish to protect the right to abortion are not “pro-choice”; they are anti-criminalization. Reframing the conflict in these terms clarifies the stakes. At issue here is not a principled attachment to “life” or to “choice” but the practical question of whether terminating a pregnancy should be considered a crime.
