We Are the Mutants Turns 10
By The Mutants
Jesus, 10 years. Launch date: August 29, 2016. Since then we’ve published almost 600 articles: many of them, in my opinion, are important contributions to cultural history and culture at large…
God Hates Hippies: Jack Chick’s ‘The Broken Cross’
By K.E. Roberts
The comic foregrounds Chick’s particularly virulent and extremist brand of Christianity—many of his tracts have been rightly classified as hate speech—and marks a very early foreshadowing of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early ‘90s…
Blank Generation: Steven Levy’s ‘The Unicorn’s Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius’
To interested observers in the 1970s, Ira Einhorn was the paragon of the bleeding-edge, Age of Aquarius thinker. He founded free classes on psychedelics, conducted one of the first “Be-ins” on the East Coast…
Chaos, Magick: The Sorcerers Apprentice Occult Bookshop
Grimy, esoteric capital of the ‘80s North of England, post-Thatcherism Leeds was a peculiarly dual-natured place. An increasingly moribund industrial economy still haunted by the atrocities…
Seas of Blood, Rains of Fire: The Post-Apocalyptic Worlds of Early ‘Dungeons & Dragons’
A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought for a moment, ready to dismiss the fictional world’s bog-standard fantasy feudalism as nothing of the sort…
“There Ain’t Nothin’ Different”: When Dystopian Sci-Fi Ruled the Cola Wars
By K.E. Roberts
Star Wars and the Cola Wars collided, launching a series of futuristic, high concept TV ads that included all the major players. At the heart of it was one Ridley Scott…
Good Vibrations: The Legacy of the NASA Voyager Recordings
By K.E. Roberts
There’s a lot going on here, but let’s start at the beginning: did Voyager I and II really collect sounds from the outer planets and their moons as they passed by? Yes, in a way. Each of the probes was equipped with something called a Plasma Wave Subsystem…
You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life
By The Mutants
Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you need to believe that goodness prevails?
Kool Kelly’s Place: True Confessions of an ’80s Bedroom
By The Mutants
A few months ago my dad sent me a whole bunch of pictures on a flash drive. This was one of them. It’s my bedroom in 1987. I’m 15…
Ain’t No Golden Age: On the Banality of Nostalgia Memes
By The Mutants
The image is important because it captures something desperately tragic about where we’re at and how we see ourselves…
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