The Children’s Classic That Secretly Brought Existentialist Philosophy Into American Homes
Maybe there is another model for fantasy, one that does not simply eschew the Christian framework established by Tolkien and Lewis that so defines the genre, but complicates it, turning the focus away from destiny and back to moral choice, to human agency.
On Haiti and the Resistive Imagination
The zombie of the Revolution has now infiltrated popular culture, history, and creative expressions.
Teenaged harbingers of change in dystopias both imagined and real.
The real Florida is wedged between county roads leading to forgotten beaches, or deep in the neighborhoods where tourists won’t go. If you know where to look, you can find its edges.
What we talk about when we talk about the Space Age.
George Lippard: Gothic Architect
Lippard’s journalism was lurid and fictionalized, his historical writing Gothic, his Gothicism sentimental, based on real events, and often intended — like his nonfiction — to instruct and improve society.
As evinced by the last four decades of DIY music, we already use the technology of tech-capitalists toward proto-revolutionary ends, even small-scale, revolutionary societies.
After disaster, there is only disaster. It is a familiar and unrecognizable present. And whether we recognize it or not, whether we read it or write it or not, we are living the climate crisis.
Some Questions About First Novels
The history of the novel is also the history of people coming into an understanding of themselves, of the ways in which we use art not only to reflect but also to change ourselves.
What unites both modern subcultures and modern terrorists (and terrorist subcultures) is no coherent ideology but a set of shared affective responses to social chaos—and if the last decade of culture has any lesson to give, it’s that emotional tourism has never been more popular.