Archives for July 2026

"In 1985, Postman, a friend and disciple of McLuhan’s, published Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that television had hijacked Americans’ attention and turned politics into cheap entertainment. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,” Postman wrote. “Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.” At the time, the average American household watched more than seven hours of television every day, a number that would rise to nearly nine hours by 2010." Rose Horowitch (The End of Reading is Here, The Atlantic 2026) "Evil denies the reality of death and all human … [Read more...]

"The French Revolution began as the result of an overall crisis of society, as we shall see. Among other factors inherent to the crisis of 1789, was the fact that the existing social and political order had become a barrier to the further accumulation of profit." Henry Heller (The Bourgeois Revolution in France) "The question is not how did we get here but what is the “here” at which we have arrived." Johanna Drucker (Recognizing Complicity, LARB 2015) “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” G.W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics) "Think, pig! (Pozzo jerks the rope. Lucky looks at Pozzo.) Think, pig! " Samuel Beckett (Waiting for … [Read more...]