“Humans turned themselves into masters only to find a new way to become slaves.”— Gunther Anders, The Obsolescence of the Human The society depicted in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie Brazil is industrial in its aesthetics and institutional in its metaphysics, bureaucratic beyond all hope. Gilliam’s original title for the project was 1984½, in homage to… Continue reading Of Refuse and Refuge: The Downward Spiral
anticon was a time, a team, a blip on a screen, a group, a label, a stable of men.anticon was a movement, a moment, an underground scene, a business, a base, a stance against the status quo.anticon was a voice, a mic, a 4-track backing track, a collective, a corrective, a fix for the pre-millennium… Continue reading Joseph Rathgeber: anticon and Beyond
We’ve all heard and had so many conversations about and with large language models lately. They all seem to be running over the same ground, too. It’s exhausting. Leif Weatherby is the founding director of New York University’s Digital Theory Lab and Director of Digital Humanities. His research focuses on literary theory, digital culture, and… Continue reading Leif Weatherby: What We Talk About When We Talk About A.I.
Of all the unlikely evergreen subjects, famous serial killers might seem the most unlikely, yet there are new media about the big ones—and Ted Bundy certainly is one of those—every year. With The Bundy Archive: Genealogies of White Masculinity (University Press of Mississippi, 2026), Bryan J. McCann has exhumed Bundy to explain the relationship between… Continue reading Bryan J. McCann: Tending the Bundy Archive
Peter Relic and I were rivals. Unbeknownst to him, for decades, we were arch rivals. Coming out of high school and coming out of undergrad, I wanted to be working in magazines. My heroes — Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze — all worked in magazines — the coolest magazines. When I was in… Continue reading Peter Relic: Bust a Move
