Games like Crusader Kings III build feudalism into their code, and in so doing assert the supremacy of the modern global North.
Tag: Modernity
“Am I Not One of the ‘Disappeared’?”
Zahia Rahmani’s « Musulman » roman hinges on a question that has gathered force in recent years: a witness is speaking, but will she ever be heard?
B-Sides: Alexei Tolstoy’s “Road to Calvary”
If you are a Russian writer called Tolstoy, you forever lurk in the great shadow cast by your namesake. After all, what could compare to War and Peace? Now ...
Conjuring Anthropology’s Future
I suspect that I was invited to review Magic’s Reason because it is largely about stage magic and stage magicians, a topic on which I once wrote a book myself ...
Walter Scott’s “Rob Roy” @200
What can Walter Scott’s sixth novel, Rob Roy, a phenomenal publishing success in 1817, tell us about the benefits and risks of a globalized economy today?
Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be ...
Austen’s Bodies
Walking back from seeing Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman’s new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished epistolary novella Lady Susan, I passed a bus stop with a Fiat advertisement on it: ...
Speculative Pulp Fiction
Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel, The Heart Goes Last, began as an unusual digital experiment. Starting in March 2012, the website Byliner played host to the “Positron series,” a sequence of ...
Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an ...
Siri, Why Am I So Busy?: An Interview with Judy Wajcman
Smart technologies—phones, tablets, wearables, and time-saving apps—are supposed to lighten our load. So why are we always complaining about overwork? Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School ...
A Muslim Future to Come?
The devastating attacks of November 13 on Paris’s 10th and 11th arrondissements viciously targeted the “progressive” heart of the city. When I am there, that is where I live. Like many other ...
Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by ...
A Playhouse Ready to Vanish: An Interview with Saikat Majumdar
She reminded Ori of the dark theatres that were breaking off in flakes of plaster and cement, crumbling into dust. That was the world that had made and nourished her. She was a playhouse with silver ...
China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of ...
The Trouble with “Modernity”
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that capitalism is the engine behind the environmental crises of the early 21st century. It doesn’t even take a Marxist: as the French environmental journalist ...
What World? Whose Algorithms?
In an arresting chapter in Carolyn L. Kane’s new book, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, she analyzes the movie Predator, which gives expression to ...
Drone Poems
The protests of Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella Revolution” were marked in early days by the intermittent appearance of a helicopter drone flying high above the crowds, looking rather like a pizza box ...
The Cost of Copying
Two recent books about copying remind us how the digital age has made Bambis of us all: we struggle, as Disney’s fawn did, to find our balance on the ice, confused by the absence of the friction that ...
Justice for “Data Janitors”
What is at stake in hiding the delivery people, stockroom workers, content moderators, and call center operators laboring to produce the automated experience?
A World of Connections and Inequality: A New History of the 19th Century
The 19th century poses special problems for historians and social scientists. If conventional views of the march of history are correct, the world should have become modern over this period ...