All articles filed in Critique

by Nicolás Vargas. As little as a month ago, it was easier to feel a sense of revolutionary optimism than it is now. Multiple wildcat strikes paved the way to union victories, a presidential candidate who championed working class values was gaining momentum and winning delegates. Then, a pandemic struck.

by Steven Monacelli. We all deserve a clean conscience, a clean ass, and a clean bill of health. To have all that, we need to add an additional demand to our calls for universal healthcare: universal bidet attachments, clean asses for all.

by Tyler Wells Lynch. Good science-fiction doesn’t predict the future; it tweaks a feature of the present and extrapolates, obsessively. Ursula K. Le Guin likened extrapolative works of science fiction to the methods of a scientist feeding large doses of a food additive to lab mice “in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities.”

by M.K. Anderson. To call Richard Dawkins “controversial” would give him too much credit. A noted evolutionary biologist and more noted racist, Dawkins’s brand of rhetoric is deliberately inflammatory. Recently, he applied it to the topic of eugenics in a Twitter thread.

by Matt Bernico. For some, faith-motivated politics looks like far-right evangelical Christianity. Others find ways to go to church every Sunday while remaining unconcerned about drone-striking children in the Middle East. Others yet interpret the faithful life as giving it all up to join the guerillas. Because of all of this, it’s helpful to look to some modern-day saints to light the way.

by Tyler Walicek. A recent post from the premiere satirical destination for out-of-touch liberals, McSweeney’s “Internet Tendency,” is structured as a series of letters from one “Amber” to her ex-“Bernie Bro” boyfriends, each of them repellent (to her) in their own distastefully “alternative” way.

by Steven Monacelli. Replete with all forms of profiteers—contractors, weapons manufacturers, think tanks, and lobbyists—war remains to this day a lucrative business. The products are meant to destroyed. The losses are socialized, while the gains remain private.

by Mel G. Last night, I dreamt of bombs dropped on babies. I woke to the echoes of screaming children in my ears, nearly an hour before my alarm. It’s hard to accurately describe the violent combination of rage and dismay that I felt this morning, the images of broken bodies of innocents fading away in the dark of pre-dawn.