Reading the Static. Ink spilled about spilled ink.
A World in the Wake of the Death of an Empire
The early Middle Ages is often conceived of as a cultural void. But nothing could be further from the truth, as Chris Wickham’s book The Inheritance of Rome goes to admirable lengths to illustrate.
A Novel About Running From Basic Social Skills
John Updike’s lengthy novel Rabbit, Run, about a boomer sex pest who peaked in high school, and makes it everybody else’s problem.
Two Treatises of Government: Will AI Change the Social Contract?
Does John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government give the emergent oligarchy a stark warning?
Documenting the Scum – Last Exit to Brooklyn
Let’s close out the year with a thoroughly depressing, but thoroughly impressive, read from Hubert Selby Jr, Last Exit to Brooklyn.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
This time I give some loose thoughts on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘The Social Contract’.
Accelerate Your Exploitation – The Burnout Society
This week I give some impressions on Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Burnout Society.
Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot
What is the ecological niche of children? Are they parasitic? For a while, I suppose so. We are, until far into our development, more or less entirely dependent on our parents, to who we give nothing of material value in return.
Writings of the CCRU 1997-2003, CCRU
An outsider’s look into the schizo-glitch web of threads that make up the Writings of the CCRU 1997-2003.
Julius Winsome, Gerard Donovan
Julius Winsome has lived alone in the woods for the majority of his life. Claire wanders into his garden, invites herself for tea, and they embark on a brief relationship. Then she leaves.
Then someone shoots his dog.
This is not John Wick.
Making Monsters, David Livingstone Smith
When I tried to answer the seemingly basic question, ‘what is dehumanisation?’, I found a simple satisfactory definition eluded me. I had some kind of vague boilerplate for the general concept, the same one I imagine most of us have to a greater or lesser extent.
Try running it through some cursory Socratic-style questioning and…
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Words and Chaos 
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