NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 58th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 21 November 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie …
Order The Intercessor paperback or ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and other booksellers. Through 30 November 2025, order The Intercessor paperback from Ingram at a 20% discount! You know that frog parable people always tell? If you drop a frog in boiling water, it will jump right out and save itself. But if …
A year before Trump was first inaugurated in 2017 was the last time I felt motivated to quote Marx. Now I just can’t help quoting myself quoting him: “History repeats itself,” wrote Karl Marx in 1852, “first as tragedy, second as farce.” He was referring to Napoleon I and his nephew Louis Napoleon. One hundred …
I have a thing for old black and white movies. Especially in anxious times, they slow me down and calm me. I think it has to do with telling a single story rather than flooding viewers with a barrage of plotlines, images, and settings. It almost feels as if someone is reading to me. I …
A few days ago I stumbled on a startling truth I want to share with you. Do you know the concept of “mirror worlds?” It has a few meanings. The one I’m using describes a parallel dimension that mirrors the world as we know it, but everything important has been flipped, monsters instead of mates, …
Back in February, when I wrote about the first few deranged actions the MAGA regime took against cultural agencies—”Il Duce Redux: Art Under Trump“—I focused specifically on art, as my title said. One of the things that tends to convince artists of the significance of our work is autocrats’ reliable tendency to go after it …
Twenty years ago, my friend Daniel Burstyn introduced me to an exercise created for Passover, the Jewish holiday which this year begins on the evening of 12 April. The holiday commemorates the exodus from slavery in Egypt (“Mitzrayim” in Hebrew, which also means “straits” or “narrow places”). The tradition is to retell the story as …
In the mid-twentieth century, it was understood that the leaders of a coup would reliably seize media outlets first, commandeering radio and later television broadcast apparatus as a quick and efficient way to stop the flow of unwanted information and discourse, flooding the people with a message that made it crystal clear who was in …
I’ve had the same conversation with many friends in the last few days: what is wrong with the Democrats? Why aren’t they responding to the Trump-Musk emergency with the speed and energy required to stop them from (to use Steve Bannon’s repugnant language) “flooding the zone with shit” at “muzzle velocity” and drowning the body …
As Trump continues to flood the zone with executive orders and brainless pronouncements designed to commandeer our attention while he attempts to install autocracy as our operating system, I’m reminded of the typology of trauma response. When pursued by a sabre-toothed tiger, we are told, our ancient ancestors experienced the same three impulses that beset …