July 18, 2022   •   By Jared Marcel Pollen

[T]he truly terrifying thought wasn’t that the Great Report might be un-writable, but — quite the opposite — that it had already been written. Not by a person, nor even by some nefarious cabal, but simply by a neutral and indifferent binary system that had given rise to itself, moved by itself and would perpetuate itself. […] And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves […] were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains.

True Crime’s Deceits: The Genrefication of Tragedy

Despite the popularity of the true-crime genre, murder isn’t meant to be watchable....

How to Become a Famous Media Scholar: The Case of Marshall McLuhan

Jefferson Pooley on the unlikely career of Marshall McLuhan, and the Luddite message of “The Mechanical Bride.”...

Un Coup d’idées: A New Translation of Mallarmé’s “A Roll of the Dice”

Can Stéphane Mallarmé and the greatest literary gamble of the 1890s still look risky and radical to 21st-century readers?...

Book of Numbers: Meillassoux on Mallarmé

Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) is the subject of an exhilarating new book by French Speculative Realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux....

The Paranoid Style: J. Hoberman’s “Army of Phantoms”

The most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published....

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