The Future Agency: Inside the Big Business of Imagining the Future
Kyle Chayka | The Verge
“While the nexus of art and technology was already established, future design agencies didn’t emerge in earnest until the 1990s, when once again the aesthetics of one avant-garde field could be conveniently applied to another. With the advent of multimedia-capable computers, it became easier for artists and designers to work with digital technology and demand for their services grew from companies who wanted to look progressive in the internet era.”
Liked Serial? Here’s Why S-Town Is Better
Amanda Hess | The New York Times
“Almost every journalist has met people like John McLemore, sources who email you under pseudonyms with tips a little too good to be true. Often they seem to mostly want someone to talk to, and to have their experiences validated by a journalist, whose job, after all, is to decide what’s important and true. Most reporters would stop taking those calls when the story ideas don’t bear fruit, but not Brian Reed. He finds Mr. McLemore’s life important in and of itself, and a whole world opens up to him.”
To Donald Trump, the American City Will Always Be a Dystopic, ‘Eighties Movies’ New York
Ezekiel Kweku | MTV News
“Movies that operate in the world of the fantastic can be an escapist retreat. But just as often, instead of withdrawing from their own era, they embody its concerns and preoccupations. Watching science fiction and fantasy movies is like reading the dream journal of the collective subconscious. Donald Trump's campaign, a bundle of exposed nerve endings and raw fear, took its campaign rhetoric about cities directly out of the pages of this journal.”
Get Out and the Death of White Racial Innocence
Rich Benjamin | The New Yorker
“The power of Get Out and I Am Not Your Negro resides partly in the films’ ominous whispers and parallel reveals. We’ve hit a turning point; so much trauma has gone down in the last 18 months that even the most delusional white person can no longer credibly strike a pose of white racial innocence. Here, film viewers should heed [James] Baldwin and behold the haunted Armitage mansion: White racial innocence is not just a form of racism; rather, it’s a belief that no longer advances the self-interest of whites, to the extent that it brutally backfires.”
Homeland’s Guilt Trip
Juliet Kleber | The New Republic
“Fear has always been Homeland’s modus operandi. Its first season told the story of an American soldier who has been converted to Islam and brainwashed into conducting a terrorist attack against his own people. The fear of Islam is mental, spiritual, physical; it is all-encompassing. With Season 6, Homeland’s central plot for the first time is not about trying to prevent an attack by Islamic terrorists. But, as in real life, fear of the other cannot so easily transition to a wholehearted embrace.”