Culture

Austin Butler stuns as the King in Baz Luhrmann’s flamboyantly entertaining biopic. — Baz Luhrmann films are often divisive, provoking a Marmite-style love/hate divide. I am firmly in the former category. Romeo + Juliet is astounding. Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge! are among my all-time favourites. His much-derided take on The Great Gatsby is also massively underrated, in a Baz-Luhrmann-remix sort of way…

It was inevitable. — The man didn’t like his sandwich. There was too much mayonnaise. So he pulled out his handgun, and he shot the two girls who made it. He killed one of them, and put the other in critical condition. Her five-year-old saw everything. …

How 30% of a Nation Ends Up Ruling the Other 70% With an Iron Fist — The world should be paying attention — because America is teaching us how democracies die. Americans are now firmly under what their pundits and intellectuals call “minority rule” — a euphemism for theocracy, fascism, and authoritarianism, heading, combining, towards the final Nieztschean goal of totalitarianism, a society where the pure…

Follow my new podcast Instagram account @chillinwithdylanpod! — The Rivals trilogy of The Challenge was some of the best seasons we’ve ever seen! The only issue is some of the rivalries are more intense than others. This is a list of ten rivalries where both people dislike each other very strongly. I genuinely wonder…

The End of Roe Marks the Beginning of the Fascists’ and Theocrats’ Vision of a Totalitarian America — There’s a thing that Americans are going to have to begin to understand. So that they can correct it, if it’s not too late. It’s this. They’re terrible — terrible — judges of social collapse. They have consistently, predictably, and catastrophically underestimated, at every juncture, the possibility that things would…

An open letter to the cheerleading conservatives. — I just want to talk. Not to Republican lawmakers right now, who have spent fifty years crafting, waiting, and planning for the moment that Roe vs. Wade would be overturned. …

The Naked and the Dead “All Art is filthy” — Marc Barham, ‘Filthy Art (Part 1)’ If you are going to write on the theme of nudes in Art then you have to include this huge bad boy by Michelangelo (see above) Yes, the statue is huge and he is…

Compliments on your skills by Japanese people don’t mean a thing — the signs are more subtle — Every learner of the Japanese language will inevitably wonder, “when am I considered fluent?” As DC Palter highlights in Why You Can Never Say You’re Fluent in Japanese, getting complimented on your Japanese language ability is not a sign of proficiency. When my American friends spoke even a little Japanese…