10/19

Surviving Amazon.

The finer points of economics go over my head, but this article is fairly clear, and I feel there's value in the conclusions it draws. Because corporations now have the upper hand in bargaining, they don't need to invest in developing countries' infrastructure if they don't want to. Taiwan and South Korea were able to negotiate this in a laxer era of globalization, and it eased their integration into the global economy. Ethiopia, on the other hand, would have to find new ways to entice reluctant corporations:

Typically fine-grained work from Eric Hynes on AMERICAN FACTORY, a film I'm interested in checking out.

I've only seen three films by James Gray (including AD ASTRA), but he's always on my to-do list.

An excerpt from a new book by Matt Stoller, who is always eagle-eyed on Democratic corruption.

Making sense of Bruno Latour and politics. (Reminder to self to read We Have Never Been Modern)

Who JoJo Rabbit is really for.

A topic very near and dear to my heart: dance-pop music, 2009-2012. While some of the words and phrasing used here imply negative value judgment (i.e. nihilism/nihilistic), I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt because so much of this analysis dovetails with what these years felt like. In 2009 I was on the cusp of graduating high school (Just Dance/I Gotta Feeling); in 2010 I was watching from Japan while Tik Tok took over the world; and later that year I entered college and began partying in earnest, my head buzzing from the ecstatic interplay of beats, rhythms, sounds and synthesizers. Those times are among my fondest memories, and while I experienced them as a time of endless possibility (hence my objection to the dour overtones of the linked article), I have to admit there were times when it felt like this was it, and not much else was waiting for me on the other side. It was a dream, and adulthood was the reality I hadn't woken up to yet. As I became more politically aware and, inevitably, more focused on actually getting the degree I was in school for, the eternal party started to die down. Years kept passing and passing. Now it's 2019, and I'm a leftist, a graduate, a worker, a mortgage-payer. Funny how short that compulsory present actually ended up being...even though it still feels infinite, in memory.

Free from all constraints, liberalism still has nothing to offer.

Multifaceted deconstruction of mind-body duality.

Too much brain activity could lead to a shorter life. This legitimately terrifies me.

Really really liked this interview with McKenzie Wark.

Against individualistic surveying, this statistical analysis argues that the strongest predictor of an area's support for Trump was growth in overdose deaths.

A lovely introduction to Issue 2 of Chuang, followed by a superb series of conversations between Chuang and the pseudonymous Lao Xie. I strongly, strongly recommend the latter link. It's taught me so much about contemporary China and Xi Jinping's reign, and I expect it will ground much of my understanding from here on out. I hope to delve into the remaining essays soon (not to mention the whole of Issue 1!).

I have to disagree a bit with what's written here. I think most of the constraints on a Warren presidency would be the same for Bernie, and thus the difference between the two is not as wide as the article claims. Yet I think the mainframe of the argument is solid, even as it (inadvertently) points to the fact that hopes shouldn't be pinned on a left-liberal savior to "fix" the US. Ultimately, the best outcome anyone can expect is that Bernie continues to stir up leftist energy that can be deployed through a diversity of tactics for a variety of goals, the effects of which cannot currently be predicted.

Sentences laid out for Catalan separatists. There's no way this will defuse the ongoing independence question.

D. Watkins bids farewell the neighborhood he said he'd never leave, wanting to give his daughter better opportunities than he had. I feel for him, it sounds like an impossible choice to make.

Right-wing shooters are live-streaming their slaughters for internet fans.

Regional dispatches from a suffering Britain. From the other end: the Tories and capital are uncoupling.

Hoarded wealth could fund a welfare state.

Seems there was a big debate this month on the professional-managerial class. The term is new to me but an intuitive one; here's Gabriel Winant on what it is, whether it really exists, where the concept came from, and what it would take to radicalize its nominal members.

The world's first novel (it's from Japan!) gains a new chapter.

The work of building solidarity between Palestinians and Kurds.

43 more accusations of sexual assault against Trump.

Heteropessimism.

Nostalgia is (profitable) poison.

The hypothetical goods of automation can't be realized under capitalism.

How Rosalie Varda helped her mother make movies, and a little on what life is like for her now. Bittersweet interview; I still miss Agnés a lot.

Golden Dawn, one of Europe's most successful fascist parties, is finally on the wane.

This is a helpful aid for me as I try to wrap my head around the concepts in Robin James' next book.

Thoughtful interview with the Dardennes about their risky new film YOUNG AHMED. They're a little too attached to universalism still, but I can recognize their efforts to tackle a tough subject respectfully. (The real problem is I've heard twice now that THE UNKNOWN GIRL has a more racist passage than anything in this new one.)

Centrist-child syndrome, which terrifies us and makes us fear ever raising children.

(Only half joking!)

Not that I consider myself PhD material, but if I ever thought of pursuing one, the idea of applying to hundreds of positions (which would surely require relocation) is an anxiety nightmare that strikes me to the core. And that's before the work even starts.

Women and erotic thrillers.

I thought this was a really honest account of being the older woman in a heterosexual relationship.

The corporate model of fandom.

Mariame Kaba on her history and how to do things together.

Total meltdown at WeWork. I've been following it with horrified fascination, waiting to see what the fallout will be. The end of money-losing monopolies? Too soon to say, but with any luck...

Is eating less red meat worth it? It's anyone's guess, but I had steak twice last week, and I definitely felt concerned about it. I'll probably just keep it minimal out of caution.

I remember encountering this anti-poptimism post like seven years ago when Trevor Link objected to the half-joking implication that his argument had fascist overtones. The Pop Utopianism Manifesto changed my life and I still count myself a poptimist, but out of intellectual honesty I have to admit there are some points made in this counter-argument worth considering. (I don't think anyone ended up taking juke as a liberatory practice though...)

Often say to myself (and others): it's a bubble!

This summer, we encountered something unexpected during our trip to Japan: extreme heat. The last time we visited was June 2017, and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. We were totally caught off-guard by how hot it was, and it altered our plans for the trip in a fundamental way. Previously we'd planned on being out all day exploring; now we had to limit our excursions to the morning and late afternoon/evening/night, avoiding almost altogether the hours between 11:00 and 4:00. It was a huge setback, and the hindrance only compounded when I stayed my extra two weeks. Long hours were spent indoors listening to music, meditating on my relationship to Japan in a manner far more abstracted than I'd planned for. We know better now, but the rest of the world won't be so savvy next summer. It could be a very big problem.

Grime Note #1: Wiley, Gangsterz

I would not be anywhere near as immersed in grime as I am without Wiley, so I always planned on beginning this process with him. Doubtless I'll be returning to his music over and over; for now, I want to highlight one of the earliest times it astonished me. The song is Gangsterz, about 2/3 through the track's sing-songy call-and-response structure. It's just a small moment really, one of many variations on a theme, but the amount of information in the following two lines alerts the listener to Wiley's gifts as an MC:

"I got stabbed 14 times I can tell you it weren't by (gangsters), my uncle got stabbed like twice and he died, I told you he's one of them (gangsters)"

In these two short lines, Wiley tells us a lot about himself, his life, and the world around him. Violence may be a constant threat, but it manifests differently depending on the recipient. At the start, Wiley brags about surviving his own stabbing, in itself a boast most can't match. You would think being stabbed 14 times is as bad as it gets, but not only does Wiley suggest otherwise, he laughs off the poor technique of his assailants. In contrast, Wiley gives us the example of his uncle, who died from what we infer are two real-deal knife wounds. Not only does this further shame Wiley's unsuccessful attackers, it also demonstrates that Wiley comes from a background of true gangsters, men whose deaths are planned and executed with great skill. In quick succession, Wiley reasserts his legitimacy, delegitimizes his foes, and locates himself as one among London's toughest.

While I wouldn't want to fetishize the violence Wiley narrates, I think it's worth noting the skill with which he shares it. The truth of the matter is more nuanced than the song permits: in his autobiography, Wiley speaks to how his uncle's death deeply affected his mother, possibly to the point of her emotionally withdrawing from his own childhood. So it's not as if Wiley offers us this fact as hero worship. Rather, it's part of a complex method of synthesizing one's own experiences, often adverse, into something meaningful. Drawing again from his autobiography, Wiley doesn't look back fondly on his own stabbings any more than he admires his uncle's. But if such violence can't be avoided altogether, at least he can speak on it and narrativize it into part of his personhood. Better to subjectify oneself than be the object of someone else's violence.

09/19

I am new to the recently departed Immanuel Wallerstein, but this article of his was a stupendous introduction. His emphasis on state-aided monopoly can, I feel, be read productively in concert with Nick Srnicek's Platform Capitalism, which also suggests that the goal and outcome of large enterprises is monopoly. Other areas, such as embourgeoisment and the role of rent, are provocative and helpful in understanding the 'new middle class' and what its powers include as something historically distinct from the bourgeoisie of earlier centuries.

Finally, the last section, on human capital, is perfectly descriptive of the higher education scam currently in place, in which the arbitrary selection for employment from a wide pool of competent (and compliant) students is the basis of the predatory student loan market. For the new middle class, with their precarious relation to institutional power, securing educational advantages for their offspring -- who then accrue necessary human capital -- is the only way for their family line to continue 'living in the present.' That is, without the property and privileges of the old bourgeoisie. In the current economic situation, where overworked and underpaid Millennials have only their own human capital to offer, I imagine this fragile consolidation will become ever-more stark in generations to come as fewer Millennials will even be able to afford college for their children at all (in the absence of some grand, transformative change on the lines of mass student debt forgiveness...which I wouldn't bet on). In exploiting the inter-generational transferral of privileges, the student loan market has impoverished boomers and their children alike -- not to mention older adults, who also make up a significant amount of the debtor percentage.

This is something genuinely unprecedented, in my opinion, and the effects of it will be lifelong in so many ways, as I've noted here before.

The problem is not the cure.

No child grows up wanting to be a management consultant.

The pestilence of radical centrism -- which, with luck, will burn itself out.

Of course the immigration crisis is a moral matter above all, but there will be economic consequences to it as well. I'm reminded of The Specificity of Imperialism, an essay in Viewpoint Magazine, which argues that imperialism will sometimes pursue strategies that would seem counterintuitive from an economic perspective. This is what distinguishes it from "mere" capitalism, with its absolute fidelity to the profit motive.

As a former lurker of SomethingAwful I've always regarded 4chan from a wary distance, but I'd actually never heard of 8chan until watching this report. (PS: despite occasionally putting out good stuff like this, I still think VICE needs to die, and soon)

Probably not the only person who considers a new dispatch from Ronan Farrow must-read. Specifically, his writing gives such a clear view of how power operates now.

Interrogating the bullshit job.

Found myself very moved by Shaviro's remembrance of Kathy Acker.

Too often, black genius is treated like a flash in the pan.

As outsourcing and automation decimated the working class, the higher-educated are now the largest left coalition in politics. Apologies for attention paid to the abuser Piketty, but this critique of his book is a helpful summary for those, like me, who haven't read it, and it also generates its own original insights.

I've seen this POW/MIA research take place on Letterboxd thanks to pd187, and now Nathan Smith's written a great summary of the whole wild history.

Climate change is already here in the Florida Keys.

A comprehensive overview of the Hong Kong protests, their achievements, their limitations, and the way they've reshaped the SAR. Highly recommended.

From Fordism to post-Fordism, dancefloor to silent disco. More by Robin James here, on the sadly departed YOLO era and the heinously hegemonic chill one.

Why is white wealth the standard from which lesser wealth is the deviance?

Horrible account of Rob Cohen's sexual abuse. Much love to the women speaking out, his daughter especially.

Good insights on why horror cinema doesn't need to be saved from itself.

I've yet to read Donna Haraway's works, but I really like this impassioned intellectual history of her.

Nice review of a book including essays by Wendy Chun and Hito Steyerl.

Resisting Bolsonaro.

Kid Cudi's debut album turned 10 a few weeks ago, and it's hard not to see his influence all over US rap of this past decade. It's great as ever, and Cudi's continued success is something that gives me a lot of happiness.

And last but not least, an excellent and informative interview with Jesse V. Johnson, whose newest film AVENGEMENT I liked very much, currently streaming on (ugh) Netflix.

08/19

I find it convincing that our current ways of thinking climate change fail to grasp its hugeness. Here's one way: not only will the use of fossil fuels have to rapidly decrease, but economies must also adapt to large increases in clean energy. It may sound simple, but the linked essay provides lots of details on what will aid or impede the process.

Dangerously close to this.

This article intro by Robin James is very humbling, given that political leadership is definitely a frame that's guided my thinking.

Not sure I totally get this but I do think it's helpful to map out a more precise definition of harm.

Haven't read No Logo, but from what this essay summarizes, the terrain definitely seems to have shifted.

Trump is not an alternative to neoliberalism, but yet another living embodiment of it.

Great, great, great critique of xenofeminism; but, more importantly in my view, accelerationism too. I'm guilty of ignoring the implications for laborers that accelerationism also glosses over, and I think this is a good faith effort to take what's good about xenofeminism and build something new from it. Very exciting stuff.

Nick Pinkerton on mega-movies.

This sounds very unpleasant and one more reason I'm glad I never seriously considered teaching.

Time will tell if the Labour Party can win back disillusioned voters in the north.

I anticipate this likely recession to shape much of my adult life.

Definitely feeling bad about knowing eating meat is bad but doing it anyway.

This critique goes over my head a bit, but what I understand is convincing and disappoints me, because I liked the concept of central planning based on what infrastructure already exists.

This says so many important things, from refusing to treat strangers like reactionary idiots to avoiding the mini-movement of irony-soaked leftism.

07/19

With Andrea Arnold's work on it butchered, my initial suspicion that BIG LITTLE LIES S2 would be a pointless cash-grab seems to be bearing out.

Generally haven't kept up with Mueller gossip outside a few key moments, but n+1 has an impressive summary of both the report and the sequence of events leading to it. Interesting in the same way that international politics is, with the U.S. verging on rogue state status.

(^I posted the above on 7/23, unaware of the hearings going on today, 7/24)

Nick Pinkerton celebrates Doris Day.

Steven Pinker and the classic "ideology of no ideology."

Break up Disney.

Always interested in the behind-the-scenes work of YouTubing, and the young people who devote their lives to it.

I always think back to Rosenbaum's total shutdown of APOCALYPSE NOW whenever the subject comes up. I used to adore the film, but reading his legitimate grievances against made me feel ashamed that I'd overlooked its ethnocentrism. I don't think I've returned to it since. Here, Phuong Le elaborates on how the metaphysical obsessions of the film are also bound up in Orientalism. The eternal conflict between good and evil -- which itself seems oversimplified -- is not an appropriate topic when it concerns subject matter that is inherently political and tied to a real, specific place. Taking place in a foreigner's misinterpretation of Vietnam, APOCALYPSE NOW balloons with unearned self-confidence, pushing Vietnam and its people out of the frame, favoring US soldiers in fashionable distress.

The terrible story of Keith Davis Jr., the first man shot by BPD after Freddie Gray's death -- and one whose survival has made him a prosecutorial target in the long years afterward. Kelly Davis, his wife, refuses to concede any territory at all on the subject of his incarceration. Through her efforts, she has exposed husband's trials as prominent displays of Baltimore injustice. I dearly hope for both of them that this ordeal ends soon.

The "loveable" Japanese Communist Party.

08/01 BONUS:

This EVA essay, by Willow Maclay, creeps me out plenty without even revisiting the last two episodes -- which, naturally I'm now tempted to do...

Probably always game for a Christopher Doyle interview, whether or not there's much new info in it.

Do the PERSONAL SHOPPER parallels need explication?

Pair this spectacular Ajit Singh chapter on China's well-considered Communism with this essay on the return of economic planning. In the overlap, you see the beginnings of a multipolar world freed from the (un-)free market's totalitarianism, opened up into material abundance with maybe -- just maybe -- the smallest chance of blunting ecological catastrophe. I don't think any of this is inevitable, but these are the trends I'm keeping an eye on if anything's going to get better. Or should we keep hoping the US military will have a change of heart and cease operations in the name of climate justice?

06/19

Two good LARB essays on the Disney behemoth as represented by Marvel. The first is too intricate to boil down smoothly, but I do want to make a point of its use of "megatelevision," as I think that gets at the appeal of these things with surprising exactness. The second complements the first by comparing Marvel films to Game of Thrones, each series enviously eyeballing the other's medium of choice. Why does TV continue to haunt the consumer unconscious in an era of discontinuous, multimedia entertainment options? What does TV's persistence actually mean in the face of easy assumptions about attention spans, consumer malleability, and changing media environments?

Finally got around to this great Max Read article about the vertiginous cliffside of Internet unreality.

More by Read, this time generating some suggestive possibilities about cinema in a post-cinematic age.

From Girish: tough stuff by Lillian Gish, and a broader reassessment of her legacy after a cinema was stripped of her name.

Eternal reminder: no matter what wrongs other nations may or may not be perpetrating, the US has no credibility as a mediator or enforcer in their affairs.

It's been a week since I've returned from Malaysia, and I remain haunted by a sign I was confronted with upon arrival in the airport. Something to the effect of MALAYSIA IMPOSES THE DEATH PENALTY FOR ILLEGAL DRUG POSSESSION. I was carrying pharmaceuticals at the time, and even though I knew rationally that they weren't the kind of drugs warned against, paranoia crept in at the edges of my consciousness. In that context, it's rather a relief to see Malaysia will be updating its drug policies soon.

"The new left economics" comes as a welcome challenge to neoliberalism, yet I feel like Beckett's point about the possibility of it saving capitalism from itself is one worth further deliberation. Tellingly, the rock star economists quizzed at the end of this essay seem flustered when confronted with the idea, sure as they are that worker-led local businesses are the silver bullet we've been needing for decades. I can't blame them for their pragmatism, but, as usual, revolution is a truer reckoning with the profound injustices being faced.

Robin James is excellent as always dissecting the gendered undercurrents of Taylor Swift's new song and MV.

The origin story of Grab, a Malaysian rideshare app on which we depended heavily during our trip.

Great work by Kelley Dong on self-efficacy and its absence from kids' movies.

On the impossibility of depicting creativity (and why we try anyway).

It looks like I've been subliminally heeding Bifo's call to resist capitalism by relaxing and enjoying yourself. Trouble is, while there's nothing wrong with luxuriation in and of itself, it's a way of life that tends toward regression and complacency. The better action is to fight back with our imperfect psyches, constructing a future rather than endlessly savoring the present. It's a hard truth for me to face, but who better than Malcom Harris to make the case?

The young generation is falling apart financially.

Boeing will live to fly another day.

Out-of-control wildfires are never going to stop.

An insightful essay from Another Gaze about the Millennial Woman archetype, whose individual resilience (cf. Robin James!) or lack thereof takes the spotlight away from collective power/consciousness. Well-written and closely observed, this has the potential to guide a lot of thinking about the functions of 21st century fiction.

Sure, why not? More by James, an older post that nevertheless seems likely to build a bridge toward her upcoming book The Sonic Episteme. I do have trouble with sound/music studies, which doesn't arrive as intuitively to me as audiovisual thinking, but this is a good primer to what I expect will be a very exciting read.

It took us about three years to actually go inside downtown's Lexington Market, and now that we've found our own treasures there (Blue Island!), along come some notorious developers to transform it into something far worse than what it is now. What's really awful is that the residents already know this means gentrification and are confronting the supposed 'community outreach' team about it, yet there's little chance anything substantive will come from these deserved criticisms. Developers never want to hear that their projects will negatively affect the people they claim to be helping.

05/19

5/3: With our trip to Singapore now only six weeks away, I'm definitely starting to dig deeper into primary sources for perspective. This is one, and it seems to me like a fair assessment of Singapore's strengths and Hong Kong's weaknesses. My main takeaway from studying Singapore is how utopian most people consider it, which I don't think is true for Hong Kong -- although it felt like my own private kind of utopia, with its towering skyscrapers, overgrown plant-life, and well-trodden streets. In contrast, Singapore seems higher-functioning and more overtly welcoming (hefty fines for misbehavior aside). I have nothing bad to say about Hong Kong, but I do value the dissenting views, and I'm sure I'll feel the same about Singapore after returning home.

A lot of very good writing on an artist I don't really like: Burial. Although you know which of his releases I do like? The Rival Dealer EP, which is somewhere along that spectrum of monumental albums and fragmentary smaller releases. Anyhow, it's always a treat to see Simon Reynolds go to work, and I love that he mentioned that masculine/feminine dichotomy in the UK Continuum, which is something I'd also noticed and internalized independently.

And of course I had to follow Reynolds' link to the Mark Fisher post on Burial. It's even better still, yet I sincerely wish I could feel the things as do these two guys I highly respect. They make Burial sound like exactly my ruminative sort of thing...maybe another listen is in order after all. Despite all the last ones not working out.

As Malaysia continues its search for Jho Low, an unexpected new wrinkle emerges. I'm reminded of the bizarre trails capital blazed in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, i.e. Benihana, Steve Madden, and wow (I legitimately forgot) Red Granite Pictures itself, who produced the film. To 'follow the money' in fraud cases is like tracing the original thread of a massive spider's web.

W.E.B. DuBois on Robert E. Lee.

Don't know what to make of this article's framing. It seems very presumptuous to claim this is how leisure time works now, especially from an Unequal Childhoods perspective. There are still plenty of children don't see their hobbies as unpaid internships (thankfully). I don't mean to be too critical, but the rhetorical choice struck me as odd. Maybe I'm also just trying to process my own unevenly-developed childhood, divided as it was between hated extracurriculars and beloved pastimes.

A good overview of Brandon Soderberg and Baynard Woods' reporting on the heinously corrupt Gun Trace Task Force in Baltimore, book soon forthcoming. It's such crucial work, even for outsiders.

Much-needed clarity from Professor Laurence Brown as always, though the article only glances over his comments. I live not far away from this site, so its shadow will be looming over me unpleasantly.

Fairly detailed peek at the economic imbalances between China and Russia which, in the face of US obstinacy, may not be such a stumbling block after all. To me this is just more evidence of a slow shift away from unipolarity and toward a coalition guided by the above two nations.

CAPERNAUM -- as universally-loathed a film as any I can think of -- finds a home in China's unique movie marketplace, where arthouse/indie movies stand a better chance than in the West. The most interesting examples of this are surely yet to come.

We live in a YouTube world.

What's next after self-optimization fails? Perhaps it's self-management, a rather more cool-headed ethos that emphasizes long odds and steady persistence. I think I've noticed this change in myself a little too: now that I've aged out of the higher-flying ambitions of my young adulthood, I feel that I spend more time looking after myself to avoid burning out, giving up, etc.

Excellent interview, but I just wanted to highlight this portion in particular, which praises Venezuela for its generosity toward marginalized people residing in the US amidst the 2008 financial crisis:

Useful thoughts from Melinda Cooper on how privatizing social burdens onto the family unit is a form of social control. Harris really likes this book, so I'd like to check it out when I get a chance. 

Brexit techno (counterposed against "lo-fi hip-hop beats to relax/study to").

The Fortnite bubble may pop just as fast as it inflated.

Advertising as prefigurative desire is just about the most bone-chilling concept I can imagine. Thanks, as always, to Rob Horning for the profound psychic disturbance.

Tankie favorite Parenti vs. mainstream leftist Chomsky. This is a long post with a lot of provocative points, and while I haven't delved into the many Parenti plugs, I think the clearest picture that emerges is one of Chomsky as a wishy-washy public intellectual. His tendency toward vagueness and reflexive anti-Communism gets a very thorough documentation here in a way that I find pretty disqualifying for serious inquiry. The points on conspiracy theory as useful political heuristic are well-noted, though that still feels like a slippery tautological slope that could be dangerous to approach. I'll have to revisit this at some point and follow some of its many sources.

Soham Gadre notes that it's been 25 years since an Indian film was selected In Competition at Cannes (SWAHAM, by Shaji Karun), in an unforgivable act of Eurocentrism against the world's largest cinema. This is a huge problem and one I'm also working to rectify, having only begun to engage with Indian films a few years ago myself. Living off Sight and Sound Lists, American web magazines, and Cannes-centric international coverage as a younger person distorted my view of what kinds of cinema mattered and what didn't, and unsurprisingly there's a racial line drawn right between those two adjoining territories. I plan to make amends by continually addressing that oversight as an adult.

More on Cannes' dark side.

Absolutely magisterial work by Hito Steyerl on "extrastatecraft," financialization, and the traumas they've inflicted upon people and places alike. Makes me want to read everything Steyerl's ever said or written.

The US problem of young people's diminishing free time and subsumption into constant workflow is a problem in Hong Kong as well. And I'd imagine this is true across much of the overdeveloped world, everyone scrambling for jobs and stability that hang precariously just out of reach. As the older population passes on, I wonder what a world shaped by such financial -- and mental -- insecurity will look like. I can't recall when or where I saw it, but recently I saw the suggestion that there are dominant affects in world history. During industrialization, the primary affect was misery; during post-war economic growth, boredom; now, anxiety.

To all appearances, China does appear to be taking its anti-corruption campaign seriously.

Nice history on Filipinos in Alaska, a.k.a. Alaskeros.

Mike Thorn interviews Sophy Romvari, whose work I always enjoy catching up with at the Maryland Film Festival.

And Baltimore's Eric Allen Hatch on the future of cinema, at least as a discrete experience.