Miniver Cheevy

Chris Reimer asks: What needs to functionally improve here at Ello to make it a player? I reply: Long text posts should be more...

Wise words from Nathan Jurgenson about some social software entrepreneurs. The people who have decided they should mediate our social...

Urban planning is a sufficiently dry and obscure topic that you wouldn't think that it would be the subject of pop music. But you...

David Roberts at Grist points to how movement conservative attacks on “elites” are an attack on the fundamental institutions of liberal ...

There's a canard I've seen come up disconcertingly often from a certain kind of conservative who will mount a defense of the ante...

This keeps coming up. So a quick word about The Patriarchy. This feminist term of art conjures an image of a vast conspiracy, with roo...

A while back I found out about a school of sharp satire: pairing “motivational” quotes — often about “fitness” — with images to suggest ...

Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg of the National Review is a notorious numbskull, but he has a blind squirrel tendency to occasio...

“That art makes me feel uncomfortable.” Classic. And: I would totally read that Batman comic.

Mike the Mad Biologist is shocked, shocked by the betrayal of conservative and “libertarian” principles in his proposed anti-poverty pro...

I keep meaning to index this stuff, so here's a start: Appropedia Appropedia is for collaborative solutions in sustainabilit...

There is a thing in American society which we call Success. I use the capital S here deliberately: I don’t mean success in achieving one...

Over at Slate Star Codex the recent long, rambling, fascinating post Meditations on Moloch offers us this: The fish farming story fro...

Today I retweeted a tweet from Kenn White ( @kennwhite ): SV [Silicon Valley] tech writers flip out after discovering Tor was created...

This keeps coming up. So a quick word about radicalism. “Radical” does not mean violent, bad, extreme, or “too much”. It means, litera...

The gnostic interpretation of Snowpiercer is too obvious. We Live In The Dark offers an analysis of Snowpiercer which is, to my m...

Something sentimental but true I just told a friend on Facebook: We need a vast conspiracy of lies and attacks in order to drown o...

Just for fun: I am, thank you. Now, if you'll forgive me the pretention of the third person ... Hulk must destroy to the be...

Timothy Burke notices something about Kickstarter. All our institutions and organizations, of all kinds, are now tangled up in their ...

A while back I learned the story of Katherine Switzer , the first woman to enter the Boston Marathon, in 1967. She hid in the bushes and ...

The SCP Foundation is a delightful product of our moment. What is the Foundation? We are the last bastion of security in a world w...

Most of today's critics of capitalism feel embarrassed when you confront them with a simple question: “What do you really want? What...

Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire. A friend on Facebook asked why ’80s rock ’n’ ...

Rick Perlstein explains the title of his forthcoming book about the consolidation of the The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the...

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was the first album I ever bought, and though I haven't listened to it straight through in y...

Apparently Zach Snyder is concerned that someone might mistakenly expect some fun in his second Superman film. Update: T...

Freddie at L'Hôte has a rant — bullshit social climber faux-antiracism — about a paradox in contemporary social justice activism. ...

Warren Ellis' Stormwatch is a story about a superhero team which is a meditation on the whole idea of superhero teams. My favorite...