Daniel Rourke /stream

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Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction Build an imaginary world in…

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On 22 February 2014, I published a post on my blog. I titled it “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race”. It read: “I’m no longer engaging with…

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Millions of years ago, a few spiders abandoned the kind of round webs that the word “spiderweb” calls to mind and started to focus on a new strategy. Before, they would…

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The job of clearing out her father’s house after his death led Jo Cooke to discover more about his childhood in Poland and strange behaviour – a process that helped her…

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Live long enough and you may hear future historians recall the war between 4chan and an art collective called LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner.

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For 10 years Josephine was a rarity: a female hotshot in the heart of Silicon Valley. Having made her name, she was in demand and looked forward to climbing the corporate…

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Like any other genre of film, television or literature, Folk Horror has its own collection of traits, tropes and tendencies.

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Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah spent months in South Carolina searching for an answer to those questions—speaking with Roof’s mother, father, friends, former teachers, and victims’ family members, all in an effort to…

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In much of your writing, you talk about the relationship between mass migration and climate change. How can climate change be more consciously linked to existing opposition to borders and everyday…

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The future as shown to us by science fictions is almost always shiny. Whether in aspirational daydreams or depictions of dystopia, the vision continues to be one of gleaming metal, stark…

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The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics.

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IN Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zero Books, 2017), Angela Nagle does two remarkable things.

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There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading…

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In the winter of 2013, I drove up California’s Central Valley to Stockton, to interview Cambodian parents who’d lost children in one of the nation’s many mass school shootings.

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To witness revolutionary futurity—the belief that social transformation is possible, and begins with a transcendence of the self—in a public space that fosters genuine politics, drive up San Francisco’s 24th Street…

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What does a real man do when things get tough at home? Runs out to buy cigarettes. Or so goes the male fantasy, as Sarah Sharma argued in her 2017 keynote…

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It was one of the very first motion pictures ever made: a galloping mare filmed in 1878 by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was trying to learn whether horses in…

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{I was invited to teach a seminar at City College’s MFA program in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is the syllabus for the course I came up with.

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When science fiction writers first imagined robot invasions, the idea was that bots would become smart and powerful enough to take over the world by force, whether on their own or…

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No one knows how to talk about climate change right now. I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the…

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In What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe insists “the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist.

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BEIJING — What worries you about the coming world of artificial intelligence? Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in…

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The inequality of badly-run or corrupt states is boosted by the power of technology – but it’s also easier than ever to destabilise these states, thanks to technology. The question is:…

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IF YOU’RE a typical westerner, you ate nearly 100 kilograms of meat last year. This was almost certainly the costliest part of your diet, especially in environmental terms. The clamour for…

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Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction Build an imaginary world in…

Bookmark

On 22 February 2014, I published a post on my blog. I titled it “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race”. It read: “I’m no longer engaging with…

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At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size,…

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The job of clearing out her father’s house after his death led Jo Cooke to discover more about his childhood in Poland and strange behaviour – a process that helped her…

Bookmark

For 10 years Josephine was a rarity: a female hotshot in the heart of Silicon Valley. Having made her name, she was in demand and looked forward to climbing the corporate…

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In 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print, The Great Wave, Hokusai published three volumes of erotic art. In one of them there is a woodcut print known…

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Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah spent months in South Carolina searching for an answer to those questions—speaking with Roof’s mother, father, friends, former teachers, and victims’ family members, all in an effort to…

Bookmark

In much of your writing, you talk about the relationship between mass migration and climate change. How can climate change be more consciously linked to existing opposition to borders and everyday…

Bookmark

The future as shown to us by science fictions is almost always shiny. Whether in aspirational daydreams or depictions of dystopia, the vision continues to be one of gleaming metal, stark…

Bookmark

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics.

Bookmark

A pioneer of “Afrofuturism,” bandleader Sun Ra emerged from a traditional swing scene in Alabama, touring the country in his teens as a member of his high school biology teacher’s big…

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There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading…

Bookmark

To witness revolutionary futurity—the belief that social transformation is possible, and begins with a transcendence of the self—in a public space that fosters genuine politics, drive up San Francisco’s 24th Street…

Bookmark

Would you advise someone to flap towels in a burning house? To bring a flyswatter to a gunfight? Yet the counsel we hear on climate change could scarcely be more out…

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It was one of the very first motion pictures ever made: a galloping mare filmed in 1878 by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was trying to learn whether horses in…

Bookmark

{I was invited to teach a seminar at City College’s MFA program in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is the syllabus for the course I came up with.

Bookmark

When science fiction writers first imagined robot invasions, the idea was that bots would become smart and powerful enough to take over the world by force, whether on their own or…

Bookmark

No one knows how to talk about climate change right now. I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the…

Bookmark

It might seem strange that a mythogeographer would be very interested in an action-horror movie from 1982, panned at the time of its release and largely ignored by audiences.

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BEIJING — What worries you about the coming world of artificial intelligence? Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in…

Bookmark

IF YOU’RE a typical westerner, you ate nearly 100 kilograms of meat last year. This was almost certainly the costliest part of your diet, especially in environmental terms. The clamour for…

Bookmark

From Modern Mythology: Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to…