I think poetry, if it’s going to be really engaging and engaged, has to be able to come at the issues of our lives from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness. […] Our lives are worth every risk, every manner of approach.
— Tim Seibles
Joy invited me on her podcast to discuss science fiction and propaganda, but the talk really honed in on the history of the OSS and its relationship to big media, and in particular Skull and Bones and Time Magazine. We also touch on Bohemian Grove, Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce and false dialectics.
What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten.
— Charles Bowden
The autumn of the patriarch, man, thinking hard about Marquez’s book, thinking back in lamentation bursts, going back in time when I met him at the University of Texas at Austin, and how he spoke to me as a young person, hopeful that I would be something as unique as he was, using what I told him was my West Texas/Chihuahua “magic realism,” founded on what I learned from his One Hundred Years of Solitude.
No, really, it isn’t any trouble at all. I’m thrilled that you’re interested, because I love to tell the story of this place; I feel the story is part of its healing quality, you know, and that is why you’re here, why we’re all here. And it wasn’t always like you see it now—by no means! We had to work at it; we really had to create it from nothing, but we did it because we believed in what we were doing, and, you know, when you really believe, the universe makes a way…
Once upon a time, on the banks of a great river in the north of our world there lay a land called Shenanigonia. The citizens of Shenanigonia were honest folk who lived in peace in their stone houses. The years went by and everyone prospered and lived healthy lives. Then one day, an extraordinary thing happened to disturb the peace. Shenanigonia had always had guns, plenty to tell the truth, but the people had never felt they were in danger. Why? Well, of course, because the elders had always solved the gun problem in the usual way — by regulating them. Suddenly the guns had begun to
Best known for his Chronicles of Narnia series, author C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is decidedly different. The demon Wormwood is working on a particular human, a man known just as "the patient." He seeks his uncle Screwtape's advice on how to tempt the man into sin and ultimately lose his soul to "our Father below." Screwtape's tips for destroying the morality of humanity are much more subtle than you'd expect, and they sound surprisingly like Ayn Rand.
Fresh off his election victory, Japanese Prime Minister Kobe as well as several of his cabinet members and top party officials, visited the Yasukuni Shrine outside Tokyo. As usual, reaction across Asia was hostile to the PM’s visit to a shrine that honored Class A war criminals that had been part of an Imperial Japanese war machine that had slaughtered and enslaved millions in the run up to and throughout World War II.
Terrorists are often sold on the idea that they could be heroes, so Suleiman Bakhit came up with a creative way to fight this myth. The Jordanian social entrepreneur and comic book author has created a set of stories for young Arab Muslims that offer an alternative narrative to extremist ideologies.
