China’s REE Monopoly

Is a night in the woods scarier than a couple silent hills?

The scariest element of Night In the Woods isn’t anything aesthetic at all—and the secret to unlocking it lies in the game’s fundamental mechanic of decision-making...

I am rearranging my music collection — looking at the album covers, hearing snippets of the songs in my head as I see each one and recall the memories attached to it...

I neither wish to be hated & deified by such as I startle...

Vergilius Vaticanus and the Puzzle of Ancient Book Culture

Texts of Greek and Roman literature do not usually come down to us in lavishly illustrated editions dating back to what we term classical antiquity...

Katey worked for a time at the Volta Cinema when she was seventeen...

When an exhibition is devoted to a theme, its paintings take a backseat, often to the detriment of the paintings...

Yesterday, while on extended hold with an appliance store, I deleted dead people from my Contacts...

The most remarkable feature of the mould-breaking expansion of higher education that took place across the world in the 1960s was the foundation of some 200 entirely new universities...

The extensive development of popular television is one of the most distinctive cultural achievements of the post-Reform era...

The Wealth of Asteroids: Berfrois Interviews Martin Elvis

The penalty in rocket fuel for mining on Mars is pretty big. Asteroids are better...

Elizabeth Bishop’s Proliferal Style by Angus Cleghorn

Bishop’s persona is part she-moose, part bus; part warrior-fish, part oily vessel; part pastoral idyll, and part atomic bomb...

The soapwort gentian now. In an old pasture, now grown up to birches and other trees, followed the cow-paths to the old apple trees...

Life…finds a way...

At the sites chosen for the groundnut scheme, tractors and bulldozers from military surplus stores in Egypt proved unable to tackle the hard ground and tough vegetation, so the planners turned to a novel solution: repurposing surplus Sherman M4A2 tanks...

“Women my age see all relationships as sexual labour,” says Molly. “Why not get paid for it?”

Italy’s Midsummer Bescheerung by Vernon Lee

The cool shadow of the fig-trees in the yards, with the whiff of that queer smell, heavy with romance, of wine-saturated oak and crumbling plaster; I know with a little stab of joy that this is Italy...

Wittgenstein tends to merge certainty and knowledge a little...

The Perpetual Hygiene Regime and the STEMification of the Intellectuals

It is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name...

Both Derrida and Ronell suggest that saying yes is “telephonic,” both in the sense that it resounds over a distance and therefore always is affected by distortion and delay, and that the telephone as technological apparatus not so much adds to these inherent obstructions as it stands model for them.

I don’t even care about secrecy, usually, because the scenario of exposing what’s unjustly censored has always seemed overdramatic to me, a distraction: all communication amounts to a defense.

Today I ran without music. When I run this way my head boils out, matter shooting everywhere like water on hot oil. Phrases reach me and mostly move away before I can trap and extend them into actual thoughts.

Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy.

Lauren Berlant flies

Lauren Berlant

Most of the writing we do is actually a performance of stuckness. It is a record of where we got stuck on a question for long enough to do some research and write out the whole knot until the original passion and curiosity that made us want to try to say something about something got so detailed.

Go to Archive >