Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s Presidency
After Trump was elected, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 rocketed. In January 2017, around the time Trump was inaugurated, 1984 was the no. 1 best-selling book on Amazon and it…
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Culture & Media
234 posts
Conservative Cancel Culture: Paul E. Gottfried et al’s “The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism”
It’s been said that when Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, the Soviet military elite had been so hollowed out by Stalin’s purges that the Red Army had trouble mounting…
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Julian Assange and the Cowardice of the Modern Media
Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the story about widespread NSA surveillance, recently resigned from the Intercept, the media outlet he co-founded, citing the publication’s increasing ideological homogeneity…
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Lesbians, Witches and Nukes: “Other Girls Like Me” by Stephanie Davies
Stephanie Davies’ recent memoir Other Girls Like Me is a moving, deeply personal account of one of the great protest movements against nuclear weapons. Davies was a warrior in her…
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The Infrastructure of Deplatforming: Loomer versus Twitter
What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a ‘thing.’—Gregory Bateson, 1978 In 1984, sociologists Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker published a paper…
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The Philosophy of Rupture: Wolfram Eilenberger’s “Time of the Magicians: The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919–1929”
When it comes to intellectual history, Central Europe in the 1920s presents a paradox. It was an era when revolutionary thought—original and iconoclastic ideas and modes of thinking—was almost the…
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Words Don’t Hurt, Ideas Do.
I am often told that, as a writer, I should recognize the power of words. As a crafter of poetry and prose, they tell me, surely I must understand the…
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The History Wars
In September 2020, President Trump caused a stir by announcing a 1776 Commission to “restore patriotic education” to US schools. The idea of the national government writing history in such…
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Brave New Literary World
I recently saw a tweet by writer Thomas Chatterton Williams that said, “We are going to need very brave novelists again.” My first reaction was that he’s right. My second…
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Why Joe Rogan Should Host the Presidential Debates
The first presidential debate of the 2020 US election cycle took place on 29 September. For over ninety minutes, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden traded barbs…
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“Troubled Blood” by J. K. Rowling
J. K. Rowling’s fifth Cormoran Strike novel, Troubled Blood, is a brilliantly successful literary work. It engages the reader on intellectual, emotional and aesthetic levels. It is a long novel—927…
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The Work of Art in the Age of the Subscription Economy
Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) is highly relevant to our current cultural and political situation, since aspects of fascist era history are…
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Beloved Child of the House
All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place. There is no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger; the mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, pools are…
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The Delight of Sentience: “Inside Story: A Novel” by Martin Amis
Martin Amis opens and closes Inside Story by addressing the reader directly. From the beginning, then, we are confidantes of the author and the implied promise of the book’s title is fulfilled—this…
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How Sport Can Reduce Racism: An Irish Case Study
Most people would probably agree that we should aspire to live in a world in which race matters less—perhaps even, as Sam Harris has suggested, becoming as inconsequential as one’s…
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The Tyranny of Fragility: How Alexis De Tocqueville Foretold the Rise of Victimhood Culture
I know of no country in which, for the most part, independence of thought and true freedom of expression are so diminished as in America … In America, the majority…
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Historical Revisionism and Critiques of Video Games
On 21 August 2020, Activision released a teaser trailer for its upcoming first-person shooter franchise Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War. It attracted social media indignation for its use…
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Don’t Read This Book
Just when you thought that the Trump literature spreading like ivy on retail bookshelves had finally completed its life cycle, here come Michael Cohen and Sarah Huckabee Sanders with more…
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