This Week in Essays
A weekly look at some of the essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: aliens
Spotlight: Eamon Murphy’s “The Test”
“The Test” tells a brief, hypothetical history of the human civilization in the wake of an ominous interaction with an intergalactic deity.
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The Future of Body Horror: Can Our Art Keep up with Our Suffering?
The individuality of body horror is its signature attribute. Nothing is more intimate than one’s own body, and by extension, one’s own physical suffering.
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Arrival: A Metaphor for Polemic Times
We are disconnected. Connection fails when we fail to take the time to literally, and therefore metaphorically, see each other.
...moreDinosaurs, Aliens, and Rappers
In its infinite wisdom, VICE has produced a show for the company’s TV channel, VICELAND, where Action Bronson and his friends smoke themselves into oblivion while they try to grapple with the immensity of history and the cosmos as communicated by cheeseball history documentaries. In the first episode of Traveling The Stars: Action Bronson & Friends, Schoolboy Q, Earl Sweatshirt, Alchemist, […]
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Benji Hughes’s Pareidolia
Love is irrational and it’s supernatural. It’s also probably what we want/need most.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, London-based journal The White Review dropped its third annual translation issue, which features a truly global range of voices from Israel to Indonesia, South Africa to Russia. Among them is a fascinating new story by Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, translated by Frances Riddle. In “Meteorite,” Colanzi combines aliens and ghosts with diet pills […]
...moreNot From This Dimension
Sarah Gerard interviews Ottesa Moshfegh for Hazlitt—among other concessions, Moshfegh admits that she’s “not from this dimension”: I’m like an alien in a human body. I come from a different place, a different plane of existence. I can’t explain that other place because I don’t know it in this lifetime, I don’t have memories of it, but I know […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Virtual reality is the final frontier. How to talk to aliens. Do livestreaming apps change the news? Ellen Pao and the media and Silicon Valley and Twitter and sexism and everything. Is virtual medicine real medicine? Facebook is hungry. So. Very. Hungry.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Grant Snider’s “Inferiority Complex” explores the inner recesses of consciousness. Then, Louise Fabiani reviews Scarlett Johansson’s scary sci-fi film, Under the Skin, which “weasels its way into your reptilian brain from its first baffling frames.” Director Jonathan Glazer does a nice job of getting the audience on Johansson’s side, even as she beckons unwitting men to their […]
...moreShort Stories for Aliens
Do aliens, once in love, ever break up? You’d have to hope so. It would be kind of creepy, all these aliens living monogamously to like age 9,000, making love in that slow, telepathic way they have. And afterward, they do that “brain meld” thing and put their “teeth” back in. Eek. Let’s give him […]
...more“I Am an Alien”
Moving to the US as a person of color isn’t easy, even when you do everything completely above-board, come from a nation friendly with the US, and arrive with a respectable family in tow. Toni Nealie discusses her experience coming to America from New Zealand in an essay for Guernica: My iris is captured in a […]
...moreSerious Men
Manu Joseph’s satirizes contemporary India, “pounding away at the caste system like a pitcher repeatedly throwing his best fastball.”
...moreMorning Coffee
Sherman Alexie has written you a poem about My Sharona. (via GerryCanavan.) WFMU’s best show takes you through the darker side of power pop (mp3). The always reliable New Scientist has a handy list of tricks for alien trackers. Check out this little dude, made entirely through friction. Recently some news has been been published […]
...moreTrevor Paglen reveals the “Blank Spots on the Map”
Trevor Paglen may be familiar for his 2008 appearance on The Colbert Report, where he talked about his book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to be Destroyed By Me, a picture book of military unit patches worn by servicemen in secret flight squadrons and other classified projects.
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