Albana Bikaj
The most watched political debate format on the internet today is the Jubilee model – one person against twenty opponents, designed to capture viral moments and audience attention with quick, rushed arguments. It looks more like a performance than a debate. By contrast, watch an old episode of...
Clifford Angell Bates
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In 1974, following the publication of her thesis, Luce Irigaray was effectively excommunicated from Jacques Lacan’s circle and from the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), the institution where she had trained and which Lacan founded. She was, as one of her commentators puts it,...
Aleksandar Todorovski
Introduction: The Mood of the Land There is a mood that pervades the rural Balkans today, and it is not one that lends itself to the optimistic vocabularies of development policy. It is a mood of quiet depletion, of watching something drain away without being able to name precisely what is being...
Dina-Perla Portnaar
You’re invited to join the digital book launch on April 9, 2026, from 18:00 to 22:00 CET. If you have a TikTok account, you can comment and submit questions during the TikTok Live. If not, you can join via the link but you won’t be able to interact. To register, send an email and you...
David Banica
“The terror of the future is always grafted onto the desire to experience that terror”. Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born The Landscape, Such As It Is The French Republic has emerged as a dominant political force in the eastern provinces of the European Union — most notably in Romania...
Aleksandar Todorovski
Alex Priou received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Philosophy from Tulane University, an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut. Priou is the author of three books on Plato: “Becoming Socrates: Political Philosophy in...
Dina-Perla Portnaar
I’m the last person who wants to tell women how to look. For centuries, religions and social norms have dictated images of femininity. Today, new groups join the chorus, performing womanhood as if it’s a costume. Still, I feel it: when I see women with immaculate fake nails, eyelashes that defy...
Clifford Angell Bates
The Emergence of Metanationals Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy presents a near-future history in which transnational corporations rise to power and assume the roles of sovereign states. The story begins in the mid-2020s and extends to the 22nd century. In this world, traditional nation-states...
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“The universal itself is precisely as idiotic as its concrete and individual appearance.” Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy In Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Žižek offers a Lacanian reading of two Hegelian figures of moral consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the “Beautiful Soul” and...
Destiny
46,800 people attended today's game. It's the last game the Oakland A's will ever play at the Coliseum — before the team moves to Sacramento for three years, and then on to Las Vegas. On the train to the stadium, everyone was wearing an A's shirt. And soon the guy sitting next to me was...
Lou Cabron
Sudoku puzzles have only one solution. And then directly above an easy-level Sudoku puzzle my local newspaper also published another grid-like math puzzle. "Try to beat today's challenge time..." the instructions begin. "The Challenger," they call it..... But I'm here to tell you this...
Destiny
Today as president Joe Biden signed the law making Juneteenth a federal holiday, vice president Kamala Harris delivered her own introductory remarks. Visibly choked with emotion, she succinctly summed up the moment's significance. Throughout history, Juneteenth has been known by many names:...
Lou Cabron
"One way we still win this election is by turning it into a referendum on China," one Trump campaign advisor bluntly admitted this week to the Los Angeles Times. That's why Trump keeps calling it "the China virus." (He actually crossed out "coronavirus" in one speech and wrote in "China virus"...
Destiny
A funny thing happened when I searched Amazon for the soundtrack to Marvel's upcoming superhero blockbuster, Captain Marvel. The first match is, of course, "Captain Marvel Soundtrack" -- but it's by someone named Roguey, selling a 28-second song with the title "Captain Marvel Soundtrack." And...
Lou Cabron
It all started in a desert. In a vast landscape with weird buttes and ancient Indian petroglyphs, a friend described a strange film-maker (and local legend) with his own weird story about selling videos on Amazon.com. Will Chase is a deejay, an artist, a Burning Man devotee and a former...
Lou Cabron
"We take misinformation seriously," Facebook's CEO posted Saturday. Right next to two very obvious pieces of misinformation... Note the lying advertisers to the right of his status update? (No, Hugh Hefner isn't dead, and no, Tiger Woods hasn't left the PGA forever.) Those ads don't even...
Destiny
Image inspired by the Cyrus Borg_A minifig Scammers pretending to be from Dell computers phoned me in November — but these scammers knew things about me. They identified the model number for both my Dell computers, and knew every problem that I'd ever called Dell about. None of this...
Destiny
They'd been waiting for more than a decade. And then Monday night in San Francisco, where the Embarcadero meets the Bay, Craigslist took over the Exploratorium for a long-awaited event. They handed out bottle openers with built-in flash drives, as well as t-shirts and Craigslist stickers with the...
Lou Cabron
No. But this is going to be a really short article without some additional context... Those cute little girls selling cookies around your neighbor are delivering junk-food snacks that are astonishingly unhealthy. ( Just four Samoas have 50% of your recommended saturated fat intake for the...
Lou Cabron
A funny thing happened when I went to sign up for ObamaCare this morning. I couldn't! The official site at HealthCare.gov just referred me over to California's web site for their own Health Exchange. And it was so overloaded with traffic that it was impossible to sign up! Apparently it didn't...
Destiny
1. Sleeping with Zorro? As a 15-year-old girl in 1957, Annette Funicello had a crush on the TV character Zorro, and "every night I drifted off to sleep hugging his eight-by-ten framed photo to my chest," she remembered in her biography. So the next year, Walt Disney had a special treat for the...
Destiny
1. "Your Movie Sucks" Roger Ebert could wield a poison pen as well as anybody. And the story of one confrontation has a permanent place of honor in Ebert's page on Wikipedia. In January 2005, Rob Schneider took out full-page ads in Hollywood newspapers to attack movie critic Patrick Goldstein,...
Destiny
I think every geek secretly wants to dress up as a zombie, and then go on a rampage to destroy mindless middle-managers. But that's probably just me — and it turns out there's some even better ideas for Halloween costumes. 1. Gollum from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy In a way, this latex...
Lou Cabron
This weekend I visited the web site for Marketplace Morning Report. It's a business news program often broadcast on public radio stations during NPR's Morning Edition and other shows. But Saturday, I noticed one enormous typo in this transcript of last Monday's interview with their Washington...
Destiny
1. The Greatest Story Ever Told I'm a fan — and there's one song Davy Jones should be remembered by. In 1986, the 41-year-old former teen idol recorded his own secret anthem. I think of it as his personal "My Way" — an original song about a life spent in show business, where (more than most...
Me and My Kindle
One of Amazon's best-selling Kindle bloggers shares thestartling real-life backstory behind The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Last spring, Random House made a startling announcement. One of their authors had made e-book history, becoming the first author ever to sell one million digital copies of...
Destiny
The gonzo author (inset) meets the cover ofhis newly-published novel The Panama Laugh Zombies! Brains! Zombies! It's the first novel ever published by author Thomas S. Roche. The Panama Laugh opens with a punch — literally — before launching into an unrelenting onslaught of dangerous...
Lou Cabron
Let's see if I've got this straight... Once upon a time, there were some bizarre mid-80s songs riffing on the Beatles — something about the 20th anniversary of the summer of love. They fell into the glow surrounding Mondo 2000 magazine, and in a deconstructive burst of creativity, became a...