Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
Category: Society & Culture
My interview for the Weird Studies podcast
Recently, I was interviewed for the excellent Weird Studies podcast. The episode, titled “On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin,” dropped yesterday. You can listen to it with the player above or by clicking through to the site itself. Here’s the episode description: Neil Gaiman wrote, If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are…
An interview with Gary Lachman on occult politics, nihilism, and the dangerous potentials of the imagination
Just published here at The Teeming Brain: my interview with Gary Lachman on his new book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. As many Teeming Brain readers are already aware, Gary is a noted writer on occultism and esotericism who contributed to my paranormal encyclopedia a few years ago….
The necessity of constructive pessimism in our dystopian world of digital illusions
Robert Kaplan, writing for The Washington Post: It is impossible to imagine Trump and his repeated big lies that go viral except in the digital-video age. It is impossible to imagine our present political polarization except in the age of the Internet, which drives people to sites of extreme views that validate their preexisting prejudices….
The man who invented the Internet didn’t foresee our Neuromancer/Black Mirror future
The following insights are excerpted from a brief but engaging NPR piece that traces the cultural arc from Vint Cerf (the “inventor of the Internet”) and his early naive optimism about this new technology, to William Gibson’s uncanny prescience in forecasting exactly where the Internet would really take us (to a corporate-controlled cyberdystopia with sharply…
Philip Roth on the value of serious literature amid the hellscape of contemporary America
Philip Roth, 1973 Here’s Nathaniel Rich, writing for The New York Review of Books about Philip Roth’s Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013: Between the interviews given in self-defense, the conversations with peers, and the exchanges with angry Jews, there emerges from Roth’s nonfiction a unified theory of the novel as a bulwark against the excesses…
How Google replaced God
NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway, writing for Esquire: Our brains are sophisticated enough to ask very complex questions but not sophisticated enough to answer them. Since Homo sapiens emerged from caves, we’ve relied on prayer to address that gap: We lift our gaze to the heavens, send up a question, and wait for a response…
The centering power of reading in an age of mass distraction
If reading is not always an act of liberation, it is at least an act of self-definition. It is an experience of solitude in which we become unavailable to those immediately around us. Even when we read to someone else, usually a lover or a child, or have them read to us, the effect is…
Instagram and the memeification of human experience
Courtesy of The Guardian, here’s another way the Internet is making life better and more fulfilling for all of us (by which I mean worse and more soullessly unsatisfying for a great many of us): Tourists have always taken photographs. Like graffiti, it’s a very human way of saying “I was here.” But in the…
Brilliant: This one-minute short film about a prepper’s dream coming true
This one-minute film by neophyte French filmmaker Gaspar Palacio is just brilliant. And I don’t use that word lightly. It’s like a master class in cinematic microfiction. Here’s how Palacio describes it at Vimeo: The one minute tale of a survivalist. When the siren rings in the distance, a family has to get inside the…