Pop culture is making us dumber, crasser, more immoral, and, especially, less adult. Such, at least, has been the claim of many a cultural critic. At Slate, Ruth Graham skewered YA fiction as catering to "escapism, instant gratification and nostalgia," and the non-children who read it: "Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbi...
2023-11-07 13:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Discussions of global war and violence often come with pleas for nuance, for context, and for historical literacy. That’s reasonable and even commendable. You can’t understand the present without understanding the past; it’s wise to try to learn as much as possible about the contours of conflicts in other countries and other cultures before weighing in. If you’re going to take part in public debate, it’s better to be informed than not.
It's also true, though, that a demand to ...
2023-11-06 13:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
A year ago Gusgus wasn’t even a thing. Now look at him!
This week was the anniversary of my first year on substack! Pretty cool. Thanks again to all of you who have signed up to read and support me. If you’re not a paid subscriber, consider becoming one so I can keep writing here!
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My chapbook, Se...
2023-11-04 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
House Republicans this week passed a $14.3 billion Israel aid package which included $14.3 billion in cuts to the IRS.
I don’t think US should be providing unconditional aid to Israel given indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza. But the cuts to offset the aid are also bad. The money from the IRS budget is supposed to offset the spending, rendering the bill budget neutral. But the Congressional Budget Office found that slashing funding for the IRS would actually 2023-11-03 14:12:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, it was Halloween yesterday! I celebrated by watching a horror film, and reviewing it. A bit late, but you know, for horror fans, Halloween is all year.
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I liked When Evil Lurks, but I didn’t love it. That’s somewhat out of sync with the critical consensus,which has been fairly ecstatic. I think that’s because of the subgenre. Most people have identified this as a mix of demonic possession, zombie films, or even folk horror. And it is! But it’s also got a b...
2023-11-01 12:00:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Image: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and was instrumental in establishing the UN genocide convention.
Experts consulted by the UN have said that there is currently “a risk of genocide against the Palestine people.” Over 800 scholars signed a statement 2023-10-31 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello all! Another week come and gone; thanks for sticking with me. And here’s what I published!
“Don’t Say,” a collage of made of LGBT writers’ words about silence. (Saint Paul Almanac)
On Ken Buck’s brief flirtation with principle...
2023-10-28 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostTom Emmer, the latest doofus being chewed up in the House Speaker debacle.
“Why did Donald act friendly to Emmer and then throw him under the bus?” Allison Gill, aka Mueller, She Wrote, asked on twitter. Her answer: “Because trump is a fascist and he doesn't want a speaker. He wants the House to be in chaos so ‘he alone can fix it’. The chaos is a feature, not a bug....
2023-10-24 20:43:47 +0000 UTC View Post
Most superheroes are in the business of foiling criminals and then putting them in jail. With the occasional arguable exception of a Suicide Squad film here or there, superheroes are usually on the side of the cops and the prison guards. They don’t question whether prison, or mass incarceration, is a good idea.
One odd exception which tests the rule is the Robert Kirkman/Cory WalkerRyan Ottley comic Invincible. The first series arc is about how superteen Mark G...
2023-10-24 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Jack Kirby is best known as the creator of beloved Marvel characters like Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four in the 1960s. Twenty years later, though, at the end of his career, he was making promotional comics for DC’s new line of toys.
The 1984-85 Super Powers comics, as they were called, were not Kirby’s, or really anybody’s, best work. They’re interesting though as a semi-unintentional commentary on the relationship between comics, creativity, co...
2023-10-22 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The blog is coming to the magnificent end of its first year (much like the magnificent tail of the kitty.) I’ve almost got 5000 subscribers; hoping to hit that before the 30th, which will be the official anniversary (more or less.) Consider sharing if you’d like to help me reach this arbitrary goal!
In the meantime, here’s what I wrote this week.
The 1973 war and the 1973 peace. (2023-10-21 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, 1980.
The Hamas attacks and the subsequent Israeli response have led commenters to a couple of historical comparisons. The first is 9/11. The second is the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
The parallels here are clear; the Hamas attacks, 9/11, and the 1973 war all involved devastating, traumatic surprise attacks, frightening death tolls, and a subsequent military escalation. The outcome of 9/11 and 1973 were very different though, and it’s worth ou...
2023-10-20 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Image: Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1936
I just read M.L. Rosenthal’s 1967 New Modern Poetry anthology, which focused on postwar poetry. It’s a fun time-capsule. Way back in the mid-60s, important poetry looked substantially different than it does now. Robert Lowell was more important than Elizabeth Bishop, and Ted Hughes was somewhat more important than Sylvia Plath. An obscure (but quite good!) T.S. Eliot associate named Anne Ridler made the cut; so did l...
2023-10-17 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The violence in the Middle East has led numerous Jewish people to explain what it means to be Jewish in this moment. This is entirely understandable. It’s also, for me, been somewhat alienating.
One person on social media said that Jewish identity is built around the Holocaust, and that Jews in the diaspora found the Hamas attack so personally traumatizing because we’re all waiting for the next genocide. Another said that Jewish people were all personally frightened and terrorized b...
2023-10-15 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello again! Comforting pic for what’s been a pretty horrible week.
Not as much writing as sometimes, but still a bunch published this week. If you’re not a paid subscriber, consider becoming one so I can keep scribbling? Also you’ll get to see my music track of the week, which can be fun if you like music and weeks.
Illinois’ ban on banning books is good, but we need activism too. (2023-10-14 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Image: Jacob Lawrence, The Legend of John Brown (1941/1977), no. 6: “John Brown formed an organization among the colored people of the Adirondack woods to resist the capture of any fugitive slave” [source]
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Fascism is caused by economic anxiety.
That’s not true. Study after study has 2023-10-11 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Death in Paradise is a completely unremarkable British detective series set in the Caribbean. Its first episode is a typically breezy nothing—except that, almost by the way, it directly confronts the series’ mostly ignored colonial dynamics. That confrontation isn’t particularly honest or insightful. But its very lack of honesty and insight serves as a kind of unintentional critique of the mechanics of colonial policing, and of what kind of perpetrator can be brought to justice...
2023-10-10 12:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Here’s what I wrote this week.
Find editors who like you. (Litmag News)
Stop debating whether Christian nationalism is “really” Christian. (2023-10-07 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
When a completed, beloved television series spins off a film, the result is going to be, one way or another, an exercise in nostalgia. At worst, you get Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where the bulk of the movie is characters staring mournfully into the distance to remind you that you too, are supposed to be suffused with sentiment. More successfully, as in Deadwood 2023-10-02 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Here’s what I published last week:
Why I’m okay with being called a content creator. (EIH)
Biden is presiding over a labor renaissance. (Public Notice)
The GOP love corr...
2023-10-01 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
California Senator Dianne Feinstein died yesterday. She was 90 and in ill health, and there had been increasing calls for her to step down. Her death also raises major questions for the 2024 California Senate contest. Whoever California Governor Gavin Newsome appoints to the seat is going to have a major advantage in the primary.
Inevitably, therefore, her death touched off a standard issue respectability debate. Some people insisted that we should all talk about Feinstein’s achieveme...
2023-09-30 12:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
After the rise of former President Donald Trump, there was a deluge of what might be termed "Real America Reporting," whereby journalists seek out supposedly typical middle-American voters—generally white, generally rural, often eating in diners—in order to conduct sympathetic interviews and glean political insights. Claire Galofaro at the Associated Press went into Kentucky in 2017 and 2023-09-28 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion,” Emma Thompson told an audience of drama students last week. “You don’t want to hear your stories described as ‘content’ or your acting or your producing described as ‘content.’ That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something.”
Subscribe now...
2023-09-26 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Eustacia and Ecgwynn, reminding us they are litter mates. Awww.
Here’s what I published this week while not staring at kitties.
Empathy doesn’t make you less racist. (EIH)
The right is silencing Anne Frank for the same re...
2023-09-23 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
How do you solve racism and bigotry? One common answer is empathy. If oppressors could put themselves in the place of the oppressed, the argument goes, they could recognize the humanity of the marginalized, and they would reject oppression.
Scholar Saidiya Hartman isn’t so sure that empathy is a solution. In her classic 1997 examination of slavery and the persistence of oppression, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hartman a...
2023-09-20 12:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Over the weekend, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press interviewed Trump and treated him like a regular politician rather than an authoritarian fascist insurrectionist who collects indictments like candy and who, oh yes, was found liable for rape. My colleague Aaron Rupar has the 2023-09-19 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Note: If you've got Apple Music, you can listen to a playlist of songs/artists mentioned in this post here.
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This weekend I wrote about Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner’s racist, sexist defense of his racist sexist book, The Masters 2023-09-18 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Eustacia reclines as another week passes. Next week! I’ve got a piece about the Matrix and empathy, a piece on Stop Making Sense, one on the no true Christian fallacy—and lots more.
But! Here’s what I wrote last week. Thanks to all of you who support me and keep me scribbling!
A Haunting in Venice shows that cozies are more sadistic than horror. (2023-09-17 12:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Jann Wenner, legendary founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has always been a racist, sexist ass. He decided recently that he wanted to make sure everyone still knew it.
As his venue for self-humiliation, he chose a New York Times Q&A with journalist David Marchese. Marchese asked Wenner why his new book of interviews with seminal rock figures, The Masters, c...
2023-09-16 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Readers of Lord of the Rings aren’t really supposed to root for Gollum. But if, like me, you’re Jewish, you might be tempted to cheer him on when he gets his teeth into the hand that feeds him, and bites down hard.
What does Gollum have to do with being Jewish, you ask? Well, he’s an antisemitic caricature.
Like stereotypical Jews, Gollum is driven by greed. And like stereotypical Jews, he is twisted, thin, and ugly, with distorted outsize facial features. Gollum hu...
2023-09-13 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post