Skip to content

Category Archives: serious stuff

Austerity Ecology

Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical The left — especially Marxist left — has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity’s woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute […]

Rooting

‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: “So is this what the rich west is really like?” […]

David Foster Wallace

The David Foster Wallace Disease Partly, I’m writing about Wallace’s high-powered self-hatred machine because it’s a way of making his disappearance from the earth seem like an inevitability—a curse he was born with. Although there’s some validity to the view that he’s a kind of martyr, he was really just an animal in an environment, […]

seals

Atlantic cod study renews debate over grey seal cull The failure of the cod to rebound even without an active fishery has only bolstered that theory. Yet, all official research seemed to disprove it, with field studies pointing to other unexplained causes of cod mortality, and the limited influence of seals. But now, a study […]

Russia

Rethinking the Big Russian Revolution What would Zygar like people to conclude after their fifteen-month journey, through Russia’s hundred-year-ago history? All he will say is that: “Everything that happened to us, in the 20th century, and is happening now is a consequence of the events of 1917.”

Drumpf as blunt instrument

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind i am usually loath to comment on specifics of American politics. As a Canadian, i am conscious that i have no standing in the affairs of another country. Mostly though, i wish for a Canada where those affairs don’t matter to us. More than enough politics that […]

“Blood and Guts TV”

MOVIE REVIEW: Christine is an arresting biopic about a reporter’s on-air suicide Indeed, seeing both movies is a richer experience than seeing either one alone. One says nobody should make a Christine Chubbuck movie. The other defiantly says, “We’re gonna make it after all.”

Chabuduo

What Chinese corner cutting reveals about modernity If what you’re making represents a world utterly out of reach to you, why bother to do it well? via reddit

bad record contracts

Why Canadian bands (sometimes) can’t make it in the States “It doesn’t fucking matter that The Hip had limited success in the U.S.,” wrote music journalist and broadcaster Alan Cross in the days after Downie’s diagnosis went public. “There’s only one reason why things didn’t work out: bad record contracts. It had nothing to do […]

A nightmare of the future

[Almost a year since i’ve used this. Facebook is too comfortable.] Priced out of rental market, Simon Fraser students sleeping on campus – The Globe and Mail “There is a lot more going on, with people who just want to keep their kids in school. We’ve all lowered our expectations. I don’t know anybody who […]