Daniel Rourke /stream

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Newly-released oil industry documents push back the start date of the world’s most successful disinformation campaign to the 1960s, if not earlier.

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People think that they sell oil, but in fact they are becoming oil. —Victor Pelevin

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For decades, as astronomers have imagined advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, they categorized such worlds by the amount of energy their inhabitants might conceivably be able to harness and use.

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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 white people on the topic of race.

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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 wait for prey to become ensnared in…

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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, means two billion different people used Facebook…

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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 ladder at least as fast as her…

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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 in English as ‘The Dream of the…

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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 unlock what went into creating one of…

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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 struggle against the border regime?

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‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.

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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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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 band.

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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 from Potrero Avenue toward Bryant Street, and…

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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 of sync with the nature of the…

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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 motion ever become truly airborne. More than…

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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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The second post in our forum on Nick and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future, from Steven Shaviro. Steven is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He blogs at The Pinocchio Theory.

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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 natural consequences of climate change seem increasingly…

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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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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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Newly-released oil industry documents push back the start date of the world’s most successful disinformation campaign to the 1960s, if not earlier.

Bookmark

People think that they sell oil, but in fact they are becoming oil. —Victor Pelevin

Bookmark

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 your mind, hanging in space. Spin it…

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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 white people on the topic of race.

Bookmark

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, means two billion different people used Facebook…

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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 change career My father’s death from pneumonia…

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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 ladder at least as fast as her…

Bookmark

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 in English as ‘The Dream of the…

Bookmark

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 unlock what went into creating one of…

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 struggle against the border regime?

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 white interiors, and of course many more…

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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.

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 band.

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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 papers from Sci-Hub.

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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 from Potrero Avenue toward Bryant Street, and…

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 of sync with the nature of the…

Bookmark

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 motion ever become truly airborne. More than…

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 as directed by some evildoer. In reality,…

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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 natural consequences of climate change seem increasingly…

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.

Bookmark

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 A.I. will bring about the “singularity” —…