We Are the Threat: Reflections on Near-Term Human Extinction

Figure 1. A “sign o’ the times” offers terror-relieving propaganda during Hawaii’s recent missile alert scare.1  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was … Read more

The Age of Vestigial Politics

Colorized print of the Flammarion engraving (artist unknown.) The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.1 – Antonio Gramsci For myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though … Read more

The Revolutionary Power of Memes

In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.1 — Guy Debord The questions that I am asked more than any others are, “What can we do? What can I do?” In the face of impending doom — which more and more people are beginning to dimly … Read more

Rediscovering Democracy in America

*This essay originally appeared in the December 2016 issue of TC Public Space, a student newspaper at Teachers College, Columbia University. The above image is a colorized print of Philip Dawe’s 1774 cartoon, “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering.” We must confront a perhaps unsettling fact: Donald Trump may be our opponent, … Read more

The American Abyss

*The above image is from the third panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.1 — Friedrich Nietzsche   The range of … Read more