Illich
Shadow Work
On Illich's concept of vernacular values, the unpaid labor that industrial society requires as the condition of its wage economy, and the recovery of the subsistence activities that industrial growth has made impossible
The Cartographer
The Films
The Horror That Instructs
On Hereditary, Black Swan, and Possession as psychological horror films that function as shadow work — using dread, disgust, and disintegration to produce genuine encounters with what the psyche conceals
The Writers
The Transmission That Looked Like Madness
On Philip K. Dick's VALIS, William Burroughs's cut-up method, and Antonin Artaud as writers who received something they could not explain and built their later work around the attempt
Flow and Peak Experience
Positive Psychology and Its Limits
On Martin Seligman's turn from learned helplessness to human flourishing, the PERMA framework, and where the science of wellbeing runs up against the questions it was not built to answer
The Architecture of Experience
The Binding Problem
On how the brain's distributed and parallel processing produces unified conscious experience, the synchrony hypothesis, and what the binding problem reveals about the outer limits of reductive neuroscience
Sociology of Knowledge
The Phenomenology of the Social World
The stock of knowledge, typification, and the multiple realities we move between without noticing
The Fine Print
No Purchase Necessary
A History of American Sweepstakes Law and Its Discontents
The Contrarians
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch and the Self That Consumed Itself
The Ecologists
The Unsettling of America
Wendell Berry and the Culture That Cannot Stay
Decolonial Thought
Can the Subaltern Speak?
Gayatri Spivak and the Problem of Speaking For
The Rebel Tradition
Living My Life
Emma Goldman and the Anarchist Wager on Human Freedom
The Other Economy
The Precariat
On the seven institutional securities the postwar labor compromise provided, their systematic dismantling, and what political possibility remains in precarious workers' justified anger