Areo - Culture & Media

Incivility, Anger, New Media and Contemporary Politics

One of the consistent claims that seems to unite everyone across the political spectrum is that current politics is highly partisan and increasingly uncivil. The conservative National Review has published…

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7 min

Culture & Media

Why the Joker Has Provoked a Backlash

On 4 October, an event transpired that, in some circles at least, seemed to provoke as much anxiety as the impending eruption of a volcano: a movie was released. The…

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12 min

Culture & Media

Independent Critical Intellect”: Why Dwight Macdonald Matters Now

Some people may remember Dwight Macdonald as a disillusioned ex-Trotskyist, a wittily irreverent gadfly or an unapologetic defender of high culture. He played all these roles during a career writing…

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4 min

Culture & Media

The Jordan Peterson Film: Unethical, Too Nuanced and Cancelled

Nuanced films don’t sell in theatres, a colleague told me a week ago. He was explaining why a theatre in Toronto has declined to screen my upcoming film, The Rise…

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5 min

Culture & Media

Being Human Is A Quest: A Review of Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte

Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-nominated novel Quichotte (pronounced in the French way, key-SHOT) is a work of postmodern picaresque with a metafictional narrative…

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14 min

Impossible Conversations

A review of Peter Boghossian and James A. Lindsay’s Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide (2019) and announcing the Letter Wiki Impossible Conversations Competition James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian’s new…

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18 min

Towards a Free and Open Internet

It has become popular lately to call for the breakup of so-called Big Tech. Such calls have come from Senator and Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the…

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6 min

Andrew Yang’s “The War on Normal People.” Book Review

Tech entrepreneur and nonprofit aficionado Andrew Yang is by far the most interesting presidential candidate of recent memory—and there is not even a close second. After the two minutes of…

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19 min

Culture & Media

Politics vs. Aesthetics: Why Great Art Cannot Conform to Our Political Views

Percy Bysshe Shelley proclaimed poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Today, that distinction belongs to Twitter mobs. Dispensing mob justice in brief and brutal 280-character decrees, these sneering Solons…

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6 min

Netflix Has Their “Han Shot First” Moment with 13 Reasons Why

Netflix recently announced they have bowed to pressure from complainants arguing that their show 13 Reasons Why’s graphic portrayal of a youth suicide was insensitive. Netflix have stated that they plan to…

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10 min

Memory and Identity: A Letter Exchange with Gurwinder Bhogal

My interest in the freelance writer and fellow Areo contributor Gurwinder Bhogal was originally piqued by his tweets: a series of gnomic utterances about the slippery nature of identity and…

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6 min

Culture & Media

Let’s Change the Nature of Public Discussion: An Introduction to Letter

Many people are nostalgic for the days when letter writing was commonplace. When they describe these longings, they usually cite the physical aspects of the experience: the movements of the…

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6 min

A Preview of “What is Post-Modern Conservatism?: Essays on Our Hugely Tremendous Times.”

In 1989, a young scholar named Francis Fukuyama published an essay with the provocative title “The End of History?” in the National Interest. He argued that, with the fall of…

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Culture & Media

Incivility, Anger, New Media and Contemporary Politics

Why the Joker Has Provoked a Backlash

Independent Critical Intellect”: Why Dwight Macdonald Matters Now

The Jordan Peterson Film: Unethical, Too Nuanced and Cancelled

Being Human Is A Quest: A Review of Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte

Impossible Conversations

Andrew Yang’s “The War on Normal People.” Book Review

Politics vs. Aesthetics: Why Great Art Cannot Conform to Our Political Views

Netflix Has Their “Han Shot First” Moment with 13 Reasons Why

Memory and Identity: A Letter Exchange with Gurwinder Bhogal

Let’s Change the Nature of Public Discussion: An Introduction to Letter

A Preview of “What is Post-Modern Conservatism?: Essays on Our Hugely Tremendous Times.”

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