American Cassandras
On Kurt Vonnegut — the man who used absurdity the way Carlin used profanity, the way Judge used satire: not as evasion but as the only delivery mechanism available for observations too true to be delivered straight. The fiction Cassandra. The prophet who kept getting funnier as the thing he was desc
American Cassandras
On Marshall McLuhan — the man who predicted the global village, the dissolution of print culture, the attention economy, and the epistemic collapse of the late twentieth century, all before 1964, and who was dismissed as a guru and a pun-slinger until history caught up with him so completely that he
American Cassandras
On Neil Postman's <i>Amusing Ourselves to Death</i> (1985) — the book that correctly read Huxley, correctly applied McLuhan, correctly described the attention economy thirty years before it existed, and was received as a cranky television critique by a culture too busy watching television to notice.
American Cassandras
On Philip K. Dick — the science fiction writer who described the simulation hypothesis in 1977, the Gnostic cosmology in 1981, and the surveillance state in 1977, all before any of them had names, and who spent the last years of his life trying to explain what had happened to him and being dismissed
American Cassandras
On the competing dystopias of Huxley and Orwell, the question of which one arrived, and why the answer — Huxley's, by a landslide — changes everything about how we understand the present moment and the tradition's purpose in it.
American Cassandras
On Mike Judge and George Carlin as the most accurate diagnosticians of American civilizational decline, why the culture processed their work as entertainment and moved on, what the Brawndo scene actually means, and the specific curse that attends anyone who tells the truth in a room full of people w