By Tom G. Wolf
Death is a touchy subject for most people. Intellectually, we know it’s inevitable, and yet it’s almost never discussed—until necessity intervenes. And for those of us who have spent time contemplating how we’ll depart this mortal coil, it tends to be in a fairly hopeful fashion: we’re lucid, surrounded by friends…
One of the most irksome things about my drizzly homeland of the United Kingdom is the widespread domestic habit of mistaking the material benefits of industrial and Colonial wealth, post-war socialism, and a happy lack of mass violence—all of which, for a good half century, guaranteed a relatively safe and stable life, good opportunities to better your lot, free healthcare, welfare, and a relatively graft-free state—for something as ineluctable as rain…
By Jake Pitre
The loss of filmmaker Nicolas Roeg at the age of 90 in November was deeply felt by cinephiles. Roeg was one of the most singular voices in movies for much of the twentieth century, influencing directors as varied as Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh. When considering his legacy, it’s worth highlighting his most accomplished decade: the 1970s…
The 1980s saw the gradual ascendancy of cyberpunk narratives in popular science fiction. The genre projected Western societal trends seen in the decade—corporate conglomeration, the rise of computer networking and global media, and the ascendancy of Pacific Rim economies, most prominently Japan—into a vision of the future bursting with high technology controlled by a few neo-feudal corporate interests…
Resistance to Trump has been led by women in various forms: protesting, volunteering, donating, contacting elected officials, and becoming elected officials. As I’ve observed and participated in these activities, I’ve frequently wished that more people had the opportunity to appreciate All I Wanna Do, a 1998 film that subverts ‘80s sex comedy tropes through a distinctly female lens…
In 1970, Chile began a new experiment in society and economy with the democratic election of Salvador Allende, who would bring about a socialist Chile under his party Unidad Popular, a mixture of socialist, communist, and radical groups. In order to realize his platform, Allende and the UP enacted…
By Zhu Bajiee
Warhammer is held up by the far-right as a shining example of a fictional property that enshrines the authoritarian ideal of “might makes right” and encapsulates an exclusionary worldview that seeks to justify intolerance and violence against the Other while enforcing strict social hierarchy, making mockery of egalitarian values and ideas of social progress. Yet it was not always thus…
In the mid-twentieth century, women’s bodies found themselves altered in strange ways by the ubiquity of radiation and attendant discourses about the power of the atom. In films such as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and The Wasp Woman (1959), female anatomy is altered by external contagions or pathogens…
If you’re possessed by the devil, you’ve been corrupted—and if you’ve been corrupted, that means you were innocent to start with. Demonic possession isn’t so much about the evil that enters you as it is about asserting that the evil comes from outside. The devil exists to tell us we’re pure…
Whenever I get to thinking about the old New York City, with its cheap book marts and thriving alt-weekly trade, its surplus of less unaffordable apartments, and tolerance (or indifference) to street art that hadn’t been curated or vetted to death—in short, the turnstile-jumping bridge-and-tunnel life that began disappearing long before 9/11—I think about Mark Beyer…
