Facebook is a capitalism problem, not a Mark Zuckerberg problemRecode - Ezra KleinFacebook co-founder Chris Hughes’s call to break up the company hit like a bomb Thursday. But the more I thought about his proposed solution, the less confident I was that it addressed the right problem.
Play button Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Six Main Arcs in Storytelling: Welcome to the Brave New World of Literary Criticismopenculture.com - by Josh Jones Is the singularity upon us? AI seems poised to replace everyone, even artists whose work can seem like an inviolably human industry. Or maybe not. …
Play button If you want to understand the age of Trump, read the Frankfurt SchoolVox - Sean IllingIn 1923, a motley collection of philosophers, cultural critics, and sociologists formed the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Known popularly as the Frankfurt School, it was an all-star
What it means that we keep talking about America like it’s a TV showVox - Constance GradySince 2015, when Donald Trump began his campaign for president in earnest, it has become increasingly common to joke about the news as if it were a TV show. A standard meme now is to say something like,
FlipboardIcon version of the Flipboard logo Judith Butler Explains Letter in Support of Avital Ronell – Letters - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Educationchronicle.com I can only speak for myself since the signatories of the letter addressed to the NYU administration regarding the sexual harassment charges brought …
The Communist Manifesto Gets a Comic Adaptation That's Both Nightmarish and Timelyio9 - Charles Pulliam-Moore As widely regarded as Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is, it can be easy to forget that the scathing, seminal critique of capitalism and the …
Study: Two Spaces After a Period May Be Better Than OneThe Atlantic - James HamblinA new study proves that half of people are correct. The other is also correct. This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical
Please don’t use this study to justify your horrible habit of using two spaces after periodsThe Verge - Angela ChenIs it better to have one or two spaces after a period? The first study investigating this hotly contested issue is here, and it supposedly gives the win to the two-spacers. But a closer look at the research
The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explainedVox - Constance GradyIf one thing’s for sure, it’s that the second-wave feminists are at war with the third-wave feminists. No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists. Are we still cool with the
The Magicians’ Lev Grossman on seeing his remix of Narnia and Harry Potter get remixedVox - Constance GradyLev Grossman’s Magicians books are the kind of books you obsess over if you are also prone to obsessing over how unfair it is that Susan gets kicked out of Narnia because she likes lipstick, while simultaneously
How Does a Queer Theorist Work?slate.com - By Jacob Brogan English professor Elizabeth Freeman discusses the ongoing role of gender and sexuality studies. This season on Working, we’re taking a look at some …
Bad Jobslate.com - By Isaac Chotiner Why corporate America is so much more awful than it used to be. There is no shortage of theories about why modern American life is beset with a …
Mortality of Middle-Aged White AmericansThe Atlantic - Alana SemuelsTwo Princeton economists elaborate on their work exploring rising mortality rates among certain demographics. Two years ago, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an alarming revelation:
Play button The controversy over Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and trans women, explainedVox - Emily CrockettBy 2013, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was already a literary sensation known the world over for her beautiful prose and complex, lively characters. Her star rose even higher after Beyoncé
Rogue One Was Literally Put Together From Pieces of Other Moviesslate.com - By Sam Adams Yahoo Movies UK has posted a fascinating, if unsurprisingly circumspect, interview with the editors of Rogue One that reveals how the first of the …
The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižekthehairpin.com - Rosa Lyster One weird trick to frustrate the hell out of a Marxist broPhoto: Andy Miah/FlickrThe other night, I pretended I didn’t know who Slavoj Žižek, the …
FlipboardIcon version of the Flipboard logoAmerican Philosophy Philosopher Richard Rorty Chillingly Predicts the Results of the 2016 Election … Back in 1998openculture.com - by Josh Jones Twenty years ago a strong academic left in universities all over the world spoke to political culture the way that a globalized nationalist far-right …
Google Books How Well Can Computers Read Fiction?The Atlantic - Veronique GreenwoodComputational tools have the ability to analyze books’ emotional arcs, but it’s unclear what they can really find out about literature. In recent years, literature has been getting attention from an unusual
The doxxing of Elena Ferrante: the uproar over the novelist’s secret identity, explainedVox - Constance GradyOne of the literary world’s biggest mysteries has been solved. That’s not necessarily a good thing. On Sunday, Claudio Gatti published an article on the New York Review of Books’ website alleging that
English professor's 500-plus tweetstorm about 'King Lear' is the literary community’s hottest beefThe Verge - Andrew J. HawkinsEnter Holger Schott Syme, associate professor of English, chair of the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, and Twitter user with 1,135 followers. And like the three
David Bowie's producer is terrified by the music industry's 'downward spiral'The Verge - Jamieson CoxLegendary music producer Tony Visconti described a vision of the music industry's dystopian future at his SXSW keynote speech this morning, calling himself "The Ghost of Christmas Future" and reading earnest,
Jane Eyre Jane Eyre and the Invention of the SelfThe Atlantic - Karen Swallow PriorCharlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel helped introduce the idea of the “modern individual”—a surprisingly radical concept for readers at the time. Consider the selfie. By now, it’s a fairly mundane artistic tradition,
Play button How to Spot a Communist Using Literary Criticism: A 1955 Manual from the U.S. Militaryopenculture.com - by DC In 1955, the United States was entering the final stages of McCarthyism or the Second Red Scare. During this low point in American history, the US …
Essays Teacher Calls Jacques Derrida’s College Admission Essay on Shakespeare “Quite Incomprehensible” (1951)openculture.com - by Josh Jones Click here for larger image, then click again to zoom in. Backstories of famously accomplished people seem incomplete without some past difficulty or …
Bernie Sanders Farewell to America's Middle Class: Unions Are Basically DeadThe Atlantic - Teresa GhilarducciThe U.S. is one of the only rich countries that has reached the (incorrect) conclusion that organizing workers is counterproductive. For a group of presidential candidates who claim to be interested in
Theodor Adorno’s Critical Theory Text Minima Moralia Sung as Hardcore Punk Songsopenculture.com - by Josh Jones With the possible exception of John Gray’s Straw Dogs, few works of philosophy confront the barrenness of human life in the modern world in bleaker …
