An appliance can become art, like Duchamp’s urinal did. But to do that it must give up being an appliance. A gallows installed on the National Mall on January 6, with a sign on it […]
Culture - Politics
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Mitch McConnell: Master of the Obvious
In two years, a great iterator of the evident will retire from the United States Senate. He was a man who stood for undeniable truth. A man who destroyed the separation of church and state […]
Class - Culture - Media - Politics - Technology
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Zuckerbucks Says Later Days to the Facts
During the 2016 election, a Buzzfeed News analysis found that “fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.” This, no doubt, is what […]
Class - Politics
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Fascism: How We Stepped in It
You know the joke about the three guys who encounter dog shit? They smell it, touch it, taste it, confirm that it’s dog shit and walk away glad that they didn’t step in it. America’s […]
Addiction - Drugs - Media - Technology
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The Children of Antimatter
Adults pissing away their mortal minutes in idle distraction is fine. But children subjecting themselves to a constant stream of idiotic nonsense is downright obscene. In the not so distant past, stimulating a release of […]
Consumerism - Culture - Dystopia - Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Brave New World
Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And […]
Dystopia - Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Nineteen Eighty-Four
More than any other dystopia, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four concentrates on its hero’s psychological state and his efforts to reveal the truth of the superstate in which he lives. Orwell’s meticulous attention to the engineering […]
Dystopia - Literature
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The Dystopia Files: Fahrenheit 451
In 1950, when Fahrenheit 451 first appeared as “The Fireman” in the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction, television was fast becoming a ubiquitous feature of the American home. The big three commercial television networks (NBC, ABC, […]
Dystopia - Literature - Philippic
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The Dystopia Files: Bend Sinister
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1947 novel Bend Sinister doesn’t focus on class war, a projected future or the awakening of an individual under authoritarian rule. It follows an exceptional man’s loss of all that makes his life […]
Culture - Dystopia - Literature - Philippic - Politics
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The Dystopia Files: It Can’t Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis wrote this political satire of American exceptionalism in the early 1930s, when one in four Americans were out of work and the complacent assumptions he’d ridiculed in Babbitt were rasped away by real […]