Thought.is

In “State of the Union, 2004,” Vidal wrote, “Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Re-reading A Moveable Feast, which inspired Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (and controversy when the “restored edition” was published last year), we encounter the young Hemingway before he morphed into the mythical Papa. And what a queer character he is, fraught with sexual anxieties and unsettled in his masculinity—an accidental theorist, whether he knows it or not.

At the same time, there were some who despised carnival as a manifestation of poor, black, and idle people. Initially only tolerated by the elites, it ended up being partly regulated by the government, partly constantly reinvented by the people, and partly appropriated by different economic forces to become the largest celebration of the Brazilian identity, not to mention the greatest showbiz spectacle on earth.

More than just the preeminent commentator on the social role and cultural politics of graphic design in contemporary culture, the English cultural critic Rick Poynor is our most reliable dashboard navigator through the visual landscape, a politically astute, historically literate GPS plotting our course through the forest of signs.

…A country where the consoling fiction of the level playing field and the aspirational fantasies fanned by celebrity culture parry any hint of class consciousness, owning a gun is the closest countless downwardly mobile Americans will ever come to any sense of immediate empowerment.

Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, who in the ’80s pioneered the industrial aesthetic with the band Throbbing Gristle, died in his sleep at his home in Bangkok on November 24. He was 55.