The study hall in my high school was a large open area with beige desks lined in a row. Fluorescent lights dumbly hummed over the linoleum floors and trapped me in between. I mostly put my head on the desk, …
The literary man isn’t dead
“The decline and fall of literary men should worry everyone.” That’s how The New York Times framed the glaring absence of men from modern literary culture, warning that young men will soon be lost to the misogynistic vortex of the …
The White Lotus has daddy issues
A fun thing about making Freudian moves in your criticism is that it lets you look sort of sophisticated and literary when you’re being reductive and, arguably, unfair. The ad hominem focus of your interpretation abuses the artist and subtracts …
Who created multicultural Britain?
Never address anyone as “doctor” in England. So warned George Mikes in his satirical 1946 How to be an Alien. Such an ostentatious display of Teutonic formality “only means they are Central Europeans. This is painful enough in itself, you …
The invasion of America’s cringe academics
Many of us born post-1945 have wondered at some point how we might deal with an approaching fascist threat. Luckily, we have three preeminent American scholars of fascism to help advise us. And the answer from Professors Jason Stanley, Timothy …
Welcome to the age of Otaku
OpenAI’s “GPUs are melting”, announced CEO Sam Altman last Thursday as he scrambled to avert a ChatGPT apocalypse. What triggered the sudden shutdown? Not a cyberattack, nor a Terminator-style takeover. Rather, it was legions of users transfiguring themselves into Studio …
The conservatism of Sylvanian Families
What does a feral dachshund have to do with a famous lioness? In Born Free, Joy Adamson told the story of Elsa, an orphaned lion cub, whom she raised and eventually returned to the wild as an adult. Just recently, …
The creepiness of Amanda Knox
Amanda Knox starts off her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, with a barbed anecdote: her mother told her once when she was a child that she would have “an extraordinary life”. And she has, though not in …
Netflix is degrading our politics
In the 1850s, Gustave Flaubert began an experiment that would impact culture to this very day. What would happen, he wondered, if someone lived their life in the manner of the books they read? The resulting novel, Madame Bovary, was …
The lost innocence of Grey’s Anatomy
I first heard about Grey’s Anatomy on the school bus. I’m turning 32 this week, and Grey’s is turning 20. It was the spring of 2005, when ABC launched this two-decade medical drama about the life and times of Dr. …
The lost New York of Henry James
It begins with a house. It is as though there cannot easily be a book unless there is first a house. It was the house that seemed to come before the word. And if the house is lost or gone, …
Why I’m boycotting AI
I went cheerfully through college listening to music on old file-sharing programmes while everybody around me had switched to iTunes. While the rest of the student body scrolled the web on WiFi, I dorkily plugged in an ethernet cable anytime …
Interview 1942 – Jimmy Dore Dives Into REPORTAGE!
Corbett and Jimmy discussed a range of issues, including the phony left-right divide, modern-day eugenics and how elites with membership in the secretive Bilderberg Group meet to plot ways to increase their vise-like grip on the global economy and governments.…
White Lotus is a Houellebecq horror
When the Covid lockdown started, five years ago, many in the laptop classes leaned into the glorious social dislocation. They embraced Zoom. They took in home deliveries and forgot to care about the carbon footprint. And they pretended to stay …
The new dystopian space race
This week, two NASA astronauts stranded in space since June returned to Earth thanks to a craft from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency shutters NASA offices, billionaire space privateers like Musk and Amazon boss Jeff …
