Articles
This is powerful
June 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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137
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Fuck It All
Hello, internet user
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 articleI was deeply inspired.
June 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 articleAfter learning my flight had been detained...
June 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 articleParadigm Shift
June 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 articleWhat is Hypernormalization?
June 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 articleSubmission by Blair Emsick
June 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 articleSTARGAZING THEREABOUT PHILLY
June 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.
Read articleRead articleThus Spake Greta thung-Berg
May 29, 2020
The transcendent neoliberal capitalist order may be invulnerable to blows struck by the weapons of slaves. But it will disintegrate in the presence of a stronger master.
Read articleRead articleThe monsters we helped create
May 28, 2020
While digital tools are indeed democratising, they have also cultivated darker aspects of human nature: Self-righteousness, narcissism, cruelty, ignorance. Hyper-individualism has gone viral, now that we are freed from the restraints of traditional authority.
Read articleRead articleCrisis of Confidence
May 22, 2020
I don’t know the history of confidence. There are no data from which to make inferences about the evolution of human self-assurance. Did doubt plague the early agriculturalists of the Levant the way it does the youth of today? On waking, did they peer into a puddle and think, You look like trash? Did others regard their own reflection with the audacity of Snow White’s evil stepmother or Dorian Gray?
Read articleRead articleMonster Mash
May 21, 2020
Syria's Assad (torturer, murderer), India's Modi (vicious zealot), Brazil's Bolsonaro (total madman), Saudi Arabia's MBJ (killer thug), Israel's Netanyahu (moral midget), America's Trump (idiotic climate-change denier), China's Xi (merciless enslaver) - we cannot allow these monsters to...
Read articleRead articleNation against Nation
May 14, 2020
On the northern bank of the Ottawa River, amid the hurling of stun grenades and tear-gas cannisters, police and Indigenous militants exchanged gunfire, killing one. It was widely reported that Corporal Marcel Lemay of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the provincial police force, was shot in the face.
Read articleRead articleNow, for the first time, we pity USA
May 11, 2020
"Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity." — Fintan O'Toole
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The Re-Enchantment
May 5, 2020
“All of them means all of them” — so said the people of Lebanon, demanding that their leaders be sacked. Belonging to every one of the eighteen officially recognized faiths (and more, one expects, that are not), masses of protestors called for an end to corruption, an end to mismanagement, an end to disparity, and an end to sectarian division; in short, a total overhaul of the country’s political class.
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