Each month the editorial team at The Monthly and The Saturday Paper curate a selection of insightful articles which explore a particular topic. Coinciding with a featured documentary topic for new DocPlay releases, these selections provide a great opportunity to dive deeper.
American politics and society has rarely if ever been as tumultuous as it is today. America’s new place in the world is the subject of open inquiry and fierce debate. But what does it actually feel like on the ground there? How does it look to an impartial observer? Too often, the picture we receive is one that America itself is creating.
Richard Cooke, one of Australia’s most admired journalists, has spent the past six months observing and travelling across America, and he writes like a dream. He writes, too, like no American could: with unique insight, humour and wit, and in an unmistakably Australian voice. Exploring and explaining American life in this most consequential of political years from an outsider’s perspective, his columns are essential reading.
Losing the Plot: The American Midterms
Caravan conspiracies, dead candidates and a miasma of acrimony … welcome to the 2018 US campaign trail. The midterms are enormous, too big for one person to take in. They encompass not only the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, but governorships and positions in state legislatures as well. They are really thousands of elections, with tens of thousands of candidates, if you count the micro-contests for county commissioners or sheriffs, and take place over hefty stretches of time and distance. While the Senate seats and congressional districts competed over are clearly demarcated, the regions they form together are ill-defined, as though ordained by someone waving vaguely at a map. It all adds up to fuzzy logic.
Christ on a Bike
The strange case of Jordan Peterson. Right now the foremost conservative intellectual in America is a Jungian self-help book author fixated on crustaceans, who can’t say whether Jesus existed or not. Who had that in the sweepstakes? But we must believe: Jordan Peterson is for real, and he was definitely not foretold in prophecy.
For the uninitiated, Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor who combines criticism of “social justice” with studies of atavistic myth and biological dominance hierarchies, finished with a patina of truisms: stand up straight, clean your room, etc. Not all of him is unfamiliar.
Notes on Some Artefacts
Political discourse in America is becoming a semiotic hot mess
Five or six years ago, around the time most people seemed to be spending almost all of their time on the internet, I began to notice a particular kind of online phenomenon, one that I did not have a terminology for. I started to call these moments “artefacts”, borrowing a term from photography that describes the machine-created distortions and ghosts that corrupt digital imagery. “An unintended alteration in data” is one definition, but this new kind of “artefact” was expanding beyond sporadic instances and becoming a persistent sub-theme in discourse at large.
