Archive

Literature & Violence: Interview with Tom McCarthy

It seems to me that every polit­i­cal order has its kind of offi­cial crap art, you know. The offi­cial crap art of the Soviet regimes was social­ist real­ism. And the offi­cial crap art of neolib­er­al regimes, or orders, is sen­ti­men­tal humanism. 

Persons of Consequence

New tech­nolo­gies open pos­si­bil­i­ties, and close oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties. We live in eco-technical nich­es as any­body else in the world, but we cre­ate our nich­es and we change them. So we adapt to the nich­es that we already have built in the past, and then we change them and cre­ate new nich­es in which we will adapt. But the chang­ing is exact­ly what we need to understand. 

The Conversation #42 — Gary L. Francione

The best jus­ti­fi­ca­tion we have for killing fifty-six, fifty-seven, what­ev­er bil­lion land ani­mals and a tril­lion sea ani­mals every year is that they taste good. And so, in a sense how is this any dif­fer­ent from Michael Vick, who likes to sit around a pit watch­ing dogs fight, or at least he used to?

Imaginary London

What I’d like to to look at is alter­na­tive ver­sions of London, unbuilt build­ings, dif­fer­ent struc­tures from fan­tas­ti­cal lit­er­a­ture (sci­ence fic­tion, that sort of thing), and just see how that reframes the city that we inhab­it every day. How it makes us see it with per­haps new eyes.