Raritania
Saturday, April 13, 2019
The Writing Life in an Age of
Bullshit Jobs
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"What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet musicians but an apparently...
Richard Yates'
Revolutionary Road
--The First Great Novel About Bullshit Jobs?
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Time and again I have been struck by the absence of fiction in any medium--print literature, film, television, anything--which even makes a ...
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
A Note on Richard Hofstadter's
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
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In his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Richard Hofstadter pointed to four principal sources--business, organized religion, &q...
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Review:
Armada
, by Ernest Cline
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Ernest Cline followed up the success of Ready Player One with Armada , in which he clearly meant to produce another work of the same kind w...
An Anorak's Thoughts On
Ready Player One
(Film Adaptation)
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MILD SPOILERS BELOW As a bestselling pop culture-soaked and action-packed young adult sci-fi novel set in a safely near future on Earth, E...
Reading
Ready Player One
: A Few Thoughts
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When Ernest Cline's Ready Player One first came out (2011) I was pretty much burned out on science fiction. (This was about the time wh...
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Toby Young, Again
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Initially I was surprised to find that Toby Young was a real person--in the sense of the film How to Lose Friends and Alienate People havin...
Monday, March 25, 2019
"Debate Me!" Screamed the Troll
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The Internet troll's demand that you "debate" them is a demand that you submit to trial at a moment of their choosing in a cou...
Saturday, March 23, 2019
The Laziness and Cynicism of "Subjectivity"
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"It's subjective," people so often say. Most of those who hear that word nod and grunt like Tim Taylor at Good Neighbor Wils...
Review:
Greenhouse Summer
, by Norman Spinrad
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The climate crisis has become the subject of rather a large body of science fiction over the years. Where that body of work is concerned it ...
Thursday, February 28, 2019
The Cowardice of Consumer-Bashing; or, Neoliberal Environmentalism
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The environmental movement has taken numerous forms, and indeed, just about every conceivable form with regard to ideology, so much so that ...
Why I Am Sick of Hearing About Cowspiracies
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It seems that today meat-eaters can hardly go a day without being subjected to a moral harangue about how their dietary preferences and noth...
Review:
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
, by Owen Jones
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London: Verso, 2011, pp. 352. As the rather charged and frankly offensive title of Owen Jones' book, Chavs , implies, his concern is ...
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Entering a Post-Scarcity Age in Fiction?
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Back in 1931 Astounding Science Fiction paid its writers two cents a word. This does not sound like very much. But one has to take inflat...
Sunday, December 23, 2018
Review:
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
, by David Graeber
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New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 368. Back in 2013 David Graeber penned an article for Strike! Magazine regarding what seemed to...
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