Essays

An ideal production of Freitag aus Licht would not be afraid to actively undermine the ideologies that underpin Stockhausen’s aesthetic vision. It would not shy away from denouncing and Evan ridiculing the composer and his nauseating beliefs. It would acknowledge and actively decry the opera’s racism while transforming its message from one of oppre... See more

Poetry is an essential part of society—but only as itself and not as a vehicle for something else.

To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”

We are courting a phenomenon k... See more

In this mirror one can see the terrifying nature of force, of this ancient human drive to turn others into things, which will never disappear, no matter how many smart professors comfortably say otherwise over coffee tables. Simone Weil knew we desperately need a clear mirror to deal with the horror of force in its most ghastly expression, which is... See more

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling, this is the activity of Art.

Houellebecq wore his biography, professional identity, marital status, and psychiatric condition – everything modern society considers intrinsic and defining of the individual – as an amusing costume to be played with and discarded. He frees himself through his work from the straitjacket of ‘identity politics’ which placates its prisoners, like a K... See more

Luxury surveillance is a phenomenon where "some people pay to subject themselves to surveillance that others are forced to endure and would, if anything, pay to be free of." You might buy a GPS bracelet to track your biometric data (which will be used by other firms), while others might be forced to wear one (and still pay for it) as part of their ... See more

To me, the significance of the theory is its introduction of a coherent frame by which we can better understand root causes for the complex array of global catastrophic risks and the prevailing crises that humanity currently faces. Critically, the Metacrisis theory also calls to our attention a staggering hidden premonition: our civilization struct... See more

To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body odor... See more