Number 9 Films/The Weinstein Company Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird and Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet in Todd Haynes’s Carol , 2015 Among the virtues of Todd Haynes’s new film, Carol , is the delicacy, the patience, and the sheer amount of screen time that it lavishes on the experience of falling in…

Roughly one hour into myscreening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the digital projector showing the print conked out. One minute, I washanging with Han Solo, Chewbacca, and all my old pals, and the next, like that, I was plunged, sweating, disorientedand gasping, into the disappointing real planet…

John Boyega and Daisy Ridley in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” directed by J. J. Abrams. David James/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures The big news about “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is — spoiler alert — that it’s good! Despite the prerelease hype, it won’t save the world, not even Hollywood,…

Last night was the fourth season premiere of HBO’s Project Greenlight— a Matt Damon and Ben Affleck passion project where they give first time filmmakers the chance to make a movie. It also provided a platform for Matt Damon to deliver a masterclass in whitesplaining—a whitesplaining sermon, if you…

T he zombie is the figure of the moment, the interminably rotting metaphor in which myriad anxieties and fears continue to find expression. Viral contagion, post-9/11 angst, rampant value-devouring consumerism, the catatonic treadmill of adult life… you name it, there’s a cadaverous horde embodying…

I t’s doubtful whether Camille Paglia – cultural critic, academic and the author of several acclaimed books including, most recently, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars – has ever pulled a punch. Since she burst on to the cultural scene in the 1990s, following the…

I n an English-language video released soon after the Islamic State (ISIS) proclaimed its caliphate last year, a Chilean convert is shown kicking over and trampling a sign demarcating the border between Iraq and Syria. By its title, ‘The End of Sykes-Picot’, the video refers to the famous and…

O urs is an age of intellectual conformism, in which expressing offensive opinions often seems to be deemed the worst offence of all; academia is decreed a ‘safe space’ where ‘uncomfortable’ ideas are banished, and using the wrong word can see you accused of committing a ‘microaggression’. And you…

E very age produces its own brand of oligarchs – feudal lords, banking gnomes, captains of industry. Our age has its own incipient ruling class, the tech oligarchs. The ascendency of these new hegemons is barely complete, and could conceivably be slowed or even reversed. But the tidal wave of new…

Aja Frost Crunch Network Contributor Aja Frost is a student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She writes about technology, career and the workplace, and social media. How to join the network My life just keeps getting easier. These days, I don’t have to run out to the store to replenish my pantry —…

What do we gain from giving inmates access to video games? Ryan Bradley | Kill Screen | December 2015 | 13 minutes (3,122 words) Our latest Longreads Exclusive is a new essay from Ryan Bradley and Kill Screen , the videogame arts and culture magazine. Kill Screen is currently wrapping up a…

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What do we owe those we take in?

Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Russia, 2013 The problem with “Walter Cronkite and the rest of them,” the American correspondents in Moscow, my grandmother used to tell me, was that all they ever did was regurgitate the Soviet media. The only exception was,…

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2015. gada 2. decembrī Izdrukas versija Krista Teivāne: Kāpēc mums atkal nesanāks? Šoruden vairāku zīmīgu atgadījumu dēļ Latvijas izglītības sistēma nokļuva zem Dāmokla zobena kā paša Cicerona stāstā – tā teikt, neesot nemaz tik šķīsta, kā gribētos domāt. Kulmināciju publiskais sašutums sasniedza…

Illustration by Sam Hofman and Kyle Bean A s we watch the fighters of the Islamic State (Isis) rampaging through the Middle East, tearing apart the modern nation-states of Syria and Iraq created by departing European colonialists, it may be difficult to believe we are living in the 21st century. The…

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Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few by Robert B. Reich Robert B. Reich; drawing by James Ferguson Back in 1991, in what now seems like a far more innocent time, Robert Reich published an influential book titled The Work of Nations , which among other things helped land him a cabinet post in…

Leonardo Antoniadis Maria Amaral, "Nostalgia," 1991, © Adagp, Paris, 2016 F ull disclosure: My latest book defends the main viewpoint excoriated by Mari Ruti in The Age of Scientific Sexism: that the differences between men and women, especially in violence and sexuality, are partly due to genetics…

Cui Xinyu/Xinhua/Corbis Egyptians attending a vigil at the Giza pyramids, near Cairo, for the victims of the recent attacks—claimed by ISIS—on Paris, Beirut, and the Russian passenger jet that exploded over the Sinai Peninsula, November 15, 2015 1. Strategists will tell you that it is a mistake to…

In this undated photo, militants of the Islamic State group display weapons and wave flags in a convoy through Raqqa city in Syria on a road leading to Iraq. (Militant Web site via AP) A year after his 700-page opus "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" stormed to the top of America's best-seller…

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Kelly Blair Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle…

We moved back to London last year. In two decades, Finsbury Park has changed: its mosque now notorious as a hub of assertive Islam in the city, the Andover Estate a symbol of the decline of public housing projects. Both are within short walks of a school, one of those tall red-brick 19th-century…

The terrorist attacks on September 11 provoked, immediately afterward, an assertion of civilizational identity and solidarity. A small group of criminals and fanatics did not pose a mortal threat to the most powerful and wealthy societies in history. Still, the collective affirmations of certain…

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Māris Zanders: Baltie tēvi un mātes Latvijas politikā http://ift.tt/1SZhHJF http://ift.tt/1NpAzU9

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