Relearning what it means to take breaks and truly unwind — Before the pandemic, it seemed that work breaks weren’t really recharging us, and the post-work hours weren’t truly resetting us. During breaks, many people’s eyes merely moved from work computer screens to personal smartphone screens. At home, gazes shifted back and forth between the glow of our phones and television…

After watching Lance Bangs’ VICE and Scion AV series Young Americans, I was struck by the reality it lays bare: that the people who express opinions on Millennials, or Generation Y, are often granted a greater air of authority than the generation itself. Lazy, entitled, delusional, and selfish—these are just…

Ever since Bradley Manning’s identity became known, and certainly before it, there has been a dynamic interplay between the definition of the whistleblower and the spy. How could an act written in 1917 possibly address or, rather, handle the complexity of a whistleblower of Manning’s scale and intent? The fact…

With Tomorrow’s Harvest, Boards of Canada create a type of hypertextual electronic tone poem to entropy. — There has always been something vaguely Pynchonian about Boards of Canada. Brilliant and groundbreaking in their preferred artistic forms, the both have obsessive attention to detail in exploring subjects as diverse as mathematics, paranoia, technology, tarot, astrology, psychedelics, conspiracy theory, cults, subliminal messaging, and so on. Unlike Pynchon, however, BoC…

Mindless internet content is the perfect mind control, and people gleefully drink the Kool-Aid. — (This article original appeared as a long read over at Death and Taxes.) The first paragraph of Aldous Huxley‘s classic dystopian novel, “Brave New World,” features the words “COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY,” to describe the World State. The real world is quite different. There is no real sense of community, not…

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House last Thursday on a 288-127 vote. The bill now heads to the Senate, where it is expected to face stiff resistance. …

Imagine Terrence Malick directing from a script written by David Cronenberg. That sort of approximates “Primer” director Shane Carruth‘s latest film “Upstream Color”, a film that variously examines viral programming, parasitic existence, parasitic love, body horror, pigs (lots of ‘em), altered states of mind, paranoia and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”…

"Spring Break forever..." Over and over James Franco's character, Alien, utters that phrase in Harmony Korine's film "Spring Breakers". The first few times it sounds comical; but the soft, dreamlike repetition soon renders it the movie's mantra. …

It seems that every other byte of the Internet landscape is littered with contrarian opinions. It’s the perfect link bait. One blogger is a Celine Dion apologist, while the next is pontificating on Michael Bay’s auteur filmmaking. …