August 24, 2020
I’m not against surveillance per se. I think it’s a very important technological tool that can help humanity fight against this epidemic, and against future epidemics, and we need to use it. But we need to use it responsibly and carefully, so we don’t end up losing our freedoms in order to get protection from epidemics. There is a huge danger of the rise of totalitarian regimes worse than anything we’ve seen before.
Read articleRead articleAugust 14, 2020
We, the people of Earth are now speaking with one voice. And we demand some systemic changes:
Read articleRead articleAugust 4, 2020
Maybe we will keep playing what’s on the score in front of us, just as we’ve been taught. Habits we acquired so long ago we can’t even remember. Otherwise it’s chaos, right?
Read articleRead articleJuly 28, 2020
Those of us who aren’t on the Covid frontlines have been told to stay home. That is our job. (Meanwhile, our actual job may or may not have been eliminated.) But as the weeks roll into months, we’re discovering that doing nothing in a crisis is its own kind of stress. Confine stessed-out people long enough and something strange happens. It’s called the Third Quarter Phenomenon. And we’re in it now.
Read articleRead articleJuly 21, 2020
Once called the “fourth estate” for its power, crucial to democracy, to check the three official branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial — journalism has suffered a hemorrhage of resources since the advent of the digital era. While social media became a vaster and faster channel for news, papers’ print circulations and advertising revenues dwindled, forcing major newspapers to go online and many smaller, local ones to shut down entirely. “Between 1970 and 2016,” Jill Lepore wrote last year in the New Yorker, “five hundred or so [American] dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough.”
Read articleRead articleJuly 13, 2020
In matters of life and fate, timing is everything. Culturally, socially, materially, the setting of your upbringing, specific to time and place, cannot but impress itself on you. And the parts of your upbringing that are not unique to you, but which are shared by all your coevals, likewise inform their sensibilities, bringing about a cohort of young people with similar experiences, common attitudes, kindred beliefs — in other words, a new generation. At least, that is the first assumption of the theory of generations. Generations, the theory holds, are defined by the events that their constituents witness together; by the culture that shapes them and which in turn they shape. Some generations are noted for the upheavals they lived through, others for those they precipitated.
Read articleRead articleJuly 7, 2020
The automobile is a hundred years old. In a mere century, we’ve manufactured billions of them — and pumped trillions of litres of gasoline to keep them running. The oil and auto industries rose in titanic tandem, both creators of unimaginable wealth and sources of employment for generations of workers, around the world.
Read articleRead articleJune 30, 2020
Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
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issue
137
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Fuck It All
June 26, 2020
Here are a few random words: Millennials, depression, anxiety, apathy, suicide, exhaustion, over-consumption, social media, breaking news, housing prices, tuition fees, healthcare, late capitalism, fuck off.
Read articleRead articleJune 24, 2020
I found you years ago and was deeply inspired. I never missed an issue until they started changing. The overall feeling had become extremely masculine and desperate, and I was forced to let go of a magazine I dearly loved. I see that you use the word “brutal” in your campaign as though it were a good thing, but I think it alienates people.
Read articleRead articleJune 17, 2020
After learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard an announcement : “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well – one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.
Read articleRead articleJune 10, 2020
In 1930, the English economist John Maynard Keynes took a break from writing about the problems of the interwar economy and indulged in a bit of futurology. In an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” he speculated that by the year 2030 capital investment and technological progress would have raised living standards as much as eightfold, creating a society so rich that people would work as little as fifteen hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and other “non-economic purposes.”
Read articleRead articleJune 9, 2020
“HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union.
Read articleRead articleJune 5, 2020
My artistic heroes are many: Alejandro Jodorowsky, William S. Burroughs, Loren Eiseley, Philip K. Dick, Arundhati Roy, Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday, Albert Camus, and François Truffaut and his confrère Jean- Pierre Léaud.
Read articleRead articleJune 2, 2020
This is just a note to say I'm thinking about you. Day-end after day-end I flick my butt, burn out, into the front stoop ashtray, follow the blue-grey smoke of my habits up into the twilit clouds. I see Orion waiting for the moon to bloom. I'm a good boy. I'll await the full moon too.
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