March 6, 2019
SUPERHERO COMICS are an inherently silly art form, one that for decades was dismissed as “just for kids,” even by their creators. But it was that very dismissive attitude toward the medium that allowed Stan Lee to tell stories and speak out — almost subversively — about social matters during times when doing so could have been dangerous.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 21, 2019
Climate change tethers us to a perspective that oscillates between the impossible and the inevitable, already and not yet, everywhere but not here, not quite. Slavoj Žižek reminds us that such oscillation indexes the “too much or too little” of jouissance.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 21, 2019
Today I took 5765 steps, blinked 28,480 times and breathed in and out exactly 23,642 times. I consumed 1576 calories – 297 of them from fat. 672 of those calories were subsequently burned by high-impact cardiovascular exercise. Over the course of the day, I used the word “obvious” 46 times – a new personal record.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 20, 2019
One minute you’re blasted on molly, snapchatting your dick-tits as Tiësto thuds in the background. Full earthquake eyes. The next you’re zoning out at some bullshit job while the world around you sinks into neoliberal quicksand. Should have saved for a starter condo. Typical Millennial.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 20, 2019
We’ve been through cataclysmic periods of lush growth . . . spent entire eras encased in ice . . . witnessed volcanic eruptions, clouds of ash that blocked the sun and choked all life out of the sky. And we saw the first magical inklings of life leap from cell to amoebae to frogs to crocs to monkeys. Then once Homo Erectus began strutting the Earth 200,000 years ago, a terrible “beauty” was born. From the earliest farms and settlements we saw the rise of towns, cities, nations, empires and with them, the birth of music, poetry, art, literature, philosophy . . . but also slavery, brutal revolutions, genocides, an unspeakable holocaust, and two savage world wars. Yet through it all, we’ve always bounced back — the human story just kept moving along.
Read articleRead articleFebruary 20, 2019
Something that caught my eye as we were stuck in the dreadful Manila traffic, with cars bumper to bumper as far as your eyes can see, was the countless murals of Rodrigo Duterte plastered around the city. I was confused, I thought “don’t they hate their president?”
Read articleRead articleFebruary 19, 2019
It happened sometime around 2010: A singular moment in human history . . . it was the moment we stopped getting angry at people gaping at their devices, bumping into us on the sidewalk . . . the moment when, with a sigh, your professor finally gave up on that student who, to be fair, was, like, always checking her phone . . .
Read articleRead articleFebruary 19, 2019
Is Sarah Lucas the indispensable artist of the #MeToo Movement? Is her work even more important in this epic feminist uprising? Are we projecting our feelings onto her art? It really doesn’t matter.
Read articleRead articleDecember 1, 2018
The methodology and ideology of modern economics are built into the frameworks of educational methods, and absorbed by students without any explicit discussion. In particular, the logical positivist philosophy is a deadly poison which I ingested during my Ph.D. training at the Economics Department in Stanford in the late 1970s. It took me years and years to undo these effects.
Read articleRead articleDecember 1, 2018
Advertising is the biggest psychological experiment ever carried out on the human race. Hypes, jolts, infoviruses, infotoxins, fake news and emotional blackmail have worked their way into the very fabric of our lives generating anxiety, mood disorders and mental dislocation on an unprecedented scale. If we hope to stay sane, keep our minds clear and create any kind of a viable future for ourselves, we need to stop seeing ads as a mere irritation . . .
Read articleRead articleDecember 1, 2018
“Why has god abandoned us!” he cried, teary eyed, to the heavens." “You’re looking in the wrong place,” said God;
Read articleRead articleDecember 1, 2018
Hearing English in a town where our white faces are exotic makes us pause, and several hours later we’re still drinking pitchers of Tsingtao beer with our new friend—a local named Laogai. He’s a musician and deeply political in a way that makes us uncomfortable. In China to criticize the government is a very, very serious crime—especially for a foreigner.
Read articleRead articleNovember 22, 2018
In the recent history of our cities worldwide, something strange is happening to development . . . What began as the project of creating a community together, undertaken in the common interest, morphed over time into an insidious corporate takeover of our public spaces and shared amenities.
Read articleRead articleOctober 25, 2018
Walking through downtown Vancouver is a striking spectacle, a study in contrasts. Teenage and young adult shoppers browse Brandy Melville, Sephora, and for the edgier consumer, Urban Outfitters, while homeless vagrants sleep through the day on sun-baked sidewalks. The perma-tanned, thin-wristed stars of CW teen shows are filmed on Snapchat idling at traffic lights as visibly disturbed veterans, dazed under the glare of the midday sun, stumble from car to car murmuring about change. Alleys where heroin addicts sit with their small children and shoot up are painted pastel pink in order to give the city a veneer of uniform corporate colour.
Read articleRead articleOctober 10, 2018
An important artifact in the history of mental pollution is found between pages 90 and 91 of the 1974 paperback edition of Robert Silverberg’s sci-fi novel Time Hoppers. Here, permanently interjected by the publisher into the flow of the story,
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