“Teeth,” WebMD informs me, “are the hardest substances [sic] in the human body”. WebMD, to be fair, is not renowned for its semantic precision. Nor its grammatical prowess. Nor its utility as a diagnostic tool. Indeed, WebMD is borderline infamous (albeit endearingly so) for inviting the bored and mildly infirmed to abduce that the cause… Keep Reading
This month there is a bonus episode of the Ark Audio Book Club podcast on David Foster Wallace’s epic of tennis, drug addiction and TV. In preparation for that, the panel has written four short reviews of this very long book, ranging from the very favourable to the sycophantically fawning. Franek (Press play before you… Keep Reading
Dear Hal, I’ve been reading about you for weeks now.1 I think I’m very into you. I sometimes feel we’re the same person, like in that passage where He2 says that “Like most young people genetically hard-wired for a secret drug problem, Hal Incandenza also has severe compulsion-issues around nicotine and sugar.” My favorite cigarettes are… Keep Reading
“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. […] Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to… Keep Reading
The impossibility of politics and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace Macon Holt Whatever happens today with the U.S. there will be something disappointing about it. Unless you naively think, as Slavoj Žižek does, that a rupture of neoliberal capitalism’s support system, in the U.S.A’s political establishment, with a Trump victory, outweighs the possibility of a… Keep Reading