culture

The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over the past decade. And /lit/’s reaction is hardly unreasonable: there’s a difference between great books (well-written, perhaps undiscovered) and Great Books, which stay in the accepted canon because... See more

It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.

It’s intended as a nuanced, edgy twist on “the discourse”, and a reference to intersectional theory to highlight and preclude the most privileged women’s likelihood to ignore the varying needs of those yet less fortunate. However, especially given its popularity with the pregnancy-causing half of the population, it reads more as an ignorant and... See more

The most frequent complaint I hear about streaming services is that they don’t pay artists fairly. Michael Pelczynski, the former Vice President of Strategy at SoundCloud, took that complaint personally. Over his five years with the streaming service, he helped conceive and implement a novel payment scheme that received much praise.

In an hour-long... See more

Joyless is the operative word, one that links bimbos and tradwives in their pursuit of pleasure, no matter how much reality it requires you to ignore, or how much oppression, disrespect, and dehumanization it requires you to endure. Feminism becomes a scapegoat for capitalism’s ills, while marriage starts to look like a safe haven. But that... See more

In some ways, book reviewers, critics, book club hosts, readers, and even the writers themselves, are engaged in a long war against the idea of fiction itself, involving the reverse-engineering and geolocation of various hurts and harms in the psychology of the writer. We are, at least in America, a nation trained in the arts of literary analysis,... See more

For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.