Dispatches from the Labor Market
While shoveling scoops of Zen Cheddar into brown paper bags, my boss decried Orville Redenbacher and the other scions of big popcorn. It was easy to empathize with the precarious position of my employer.
Empathetic Satire, Perpetual Crisis, and “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip”
For George Saunders, crisis is often a foregone conclusion, a reality of everyday life. Social mores and idealistic principles prove flimsy, as disaster and defeat become the glue that increasingly holds people together.
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will… or something like that
The fantasy that cultural and political engagement is a gift bestowed upon the poor by often white and rich benefactors is characteristic of the all-consuming culture of gentrification, and the prevalent ideology of supply-side economics.
Hannah Arendt is a film that focuses almost exclusively on the subject of thinking, or rather on the subject of thinking while smoking cigarettes.