A Gilded Planet

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story offers a vision of the future that follows present day social, political and economic trends to their sardonically satirical dystopian conclusion. It is a novel that sets a star crossed romance against the backdrop of the decadent west in decline. The author, Gary Shteyngart, imagines his future dystopia literally rather than allegorically. This allows him to create characters that are more real than symbolic. But it also leads to some odd examples of a kind of warped literary prescience. The emergence of an Occupy Wall Street type movement in the imagined future of the novel is probably the most prominent example of this prescience. The book was published over a year before the tents started to go up at Zucotti Park, but the parallels between the rolling campsite protests that occur in the novel due to the U.S.'s continued economic problems bear an eerie resemblence to what transpired in reality not so ...

The Dark Knight Rises 2012. 164 minutes. USA. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Watchdate: 7/20/2012. If The Dark Knight was The Godfather Part II of comic book movies, this movie is thankfully not The Godfather Part III of comic book movies (that dubious honor belongs to X3: X-Men United ). That may not be the kindest way to begin discussing this movie, but it feels honest to me. Leaving aside the tragic events that occurred in Colorado when the movie opened, I see a lot to like about The Dark Knight Rises but it is also clear to me that all of The Dark Knight's weaknesses are present with interest in this sequel - the hurried editing, the narrative overambition, the underdeveloped characters. However, the biggest problem is that these weaknesses are not excused by strengths nearly as formidable as those of its predecessor. Still, I will give the movie a considerable amount of credit for two of its overarching aspects. First, its sly determination to bring a dizzying co...

I haven't written much about the Occupy movement both because I'm lazy and because I haven't thought of anything original to say about it. I have taken a baton to the stomach, I have participated in actions that have stopped (at least for now) further fee increases that would make the UC system even less affordable, and just a couple of weeks ago I took part in a largely unreported occupation that restored funding to the Anthropology Library (we had to do the same thing over two years ago before Occupy Wall Street was a national catchphrase). But so far, I haven't been able to articulate anything that anyone else hasn't already written better than I could. That still remains the case, but I think that writing about how CNN and the New York Times failed utterly and deceived their readers in "reporting" on Occupy Oakland this weekend is worthwhile even though someone else has already described what they did. Because the message must get out there: believe al...