A recent HuffPost headline captured the mood of Democrats after Trump’s 2024 election victory: “Shell-Shocked Democrats Stumbling For Answers After Loss To Donald Trump.” Similar reactions reverberated across major corporate media outlets. CNN reported, “Still-stunned...
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The First AI Election: When Convincing Deepfakes Influence the Electorate
“We are so screwed, it’s beyond what most of us can imagine,” exclaimed Aviv Ovadya. “We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago, and we're even more screwed now. And the further you look into the future, the worse it gets.” Ovadya, CEO of the AI & Democracy...
Manufacturing Outrage, One Pet at a Time
Disinformation, Hyper-Partisan Media, and the Perils of Big Tech “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana [Bash],” Republican...
Rocking The Forest: Rockstadt Extreme Fest Pummels Romania
Nestled beneath lush pine forests of the Carpathian Mountains in the quaint Transylvanian town of Rasnov, Rockstadt Extreme Fest unleashed its tenth annual independent music festival, their website boasting, “The largest and most monumental heavy metal festival in...
Op-Ed: Educators Are Not the Enemy
Unlike Simone Biles, who stuck the landing on physics-defying aerial brilliance, leading the women’s gymnastics team to a gold medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics, J.D. Vance…
States of Emergency, Then and Now: Artists’ Reflections on Sustained Turbulence and FLEFF
Patricia R. Zimmermann opens her book “States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies” (2000) with a reality-check: “We are poised on a crumbling, frightening precipice as we edge into the enigmatic morphing media landscapes of the twenty-first century. Whether...
An Anticolonial Fight in the U.S. Heartland? No, But…
We focus on the fights. The left explodes in anger when someone from the right insults gender diversity or fails to criticize a racist statement. Understandably. The right stews in rage as the left scoffs at conservatives, speaking as if all are racist and homophobic....
Finding My Way to Max Tohline’s ‘A Supercut of Supercuts’
We often discover new media fascinations in roundabout ways. In February of 2022, when filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki emailed me to ask if I’d seen Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s “Forensickness” (2022), I had only the vaguest sense of what had come to be called the “video essay.” I...
Complicity and Resistance in a Time of Genocidal Agony
What to Do? I am writing especially thinking about Palestinian women. They have suffered so immeasurably and grotesquely while they have tried to care for their children and their pregnancies, while being malnourished, dehydrated, starved, and heartbroken while death...
The Heritage of Language: Antisemitism and Islamophobia are Western Words
As the world watches the dystopian horror movie in Gaza unfolding on social and traditional media, U.S. news networks are giving more attention this week to the Hollywood awards season. As South Africa makes the case against Israel’s genocide at the International...