Trump
Donald Trump is conservative resentment and spectacle made flesh. In the four or so years since he first converted himself into a rage machine, banging on about Obama’s birth certificate and so forth, he has developed into an adept at stoking conservative resentment. And as for spectacle, Trump is one of the defining showmen of our new Gilded Age.
Trapped in the Virtual Classroom
Let me start with a proposition: the great social calamity of our time is that people are being replaced by machines. This is happening and it will go on happening. But we may want to stop or slow the process when we have a chance, in order to ask a large question. To what extent are the uniquely human elements of our lives, things not reproducible by mechanical or technical substitutes, the result of spontaneous or unplanned experience?