Under the Banner of Heaven
The trailer for Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven piqued my interest a few months back. Not because the show looked especially good,...
The Blind Arcade
Aug 15, 20225 min read
A Most Horrible Place
In his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog visits the humans who work in the remote ice of Antarctica....
The Blind Arcade
Aug 5, 20223 min read
Proving Ground
At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, a British army under General Kitchener took on a Mahdist force outside of what is now Khartoum in...
The Blind Arcade
Jul 30, 20226 min read
Nuclear Power
I’ve changed my thinking on nuclear energy in recent years, and it's taken a decided turn toward the skeptical. It’s ironic that the...
The Blind Arcade
Jul 10, 20226 min read
Tiny Cracks
When breaking down prisoners of war, it’s a common practice to begin with very small lies. Western powers have used this tactic, but it’s...
The Blind Arcade
Jun 29, 20223 min read
The Noble Lie
As an American child of the 1980s, I grew up in the shadow of AIDS. I heard stories and watched movies about the “Free Love” 1960s and...
The Blind Arcade
Jun 25, 20228 min read
Metcalf Power Substation
On April 16, 2013, the PG&E Metcalf Power Substation came under attack. The station provides power to much of California’s Santa Clara...
The Blind Arcade
Jun 13, 20223 min read
Pessimism
I’m sometimes accused of being a pessimist. I don’t mind the accusation, since it’s usually levied around some topic in which pessimism...
The Blind Arcade
Jun 3, 20222 min read
China White
In the late 1970s, a wave of peculiar drug overdose deaths hit Southern California. The victims came from across the social strata, and...
The Blind Arcade
Jun 1, 20224 min read
Risk
"France conquered Europe in self defense." I've seen this thought offered up by several historians of Napoleonic France, in reference to...
The Blind Arcade
May 27, 20222 min read
The Magic Box
Elizabeth Holmes, founder of infamous biotech fraud Theranos, is hardly the first American huckster. The archetype is deeply embedded in...
The Blind Arcade
May 21, 20225 min read
Heath Ledger
In the wake of his suicide in 2008, the story spread that Heath Ledger had been driven to end his life by his “method acting” approach to...
The Blind Arcade
May 16, 20223 min read
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
The reverend Billy Graham once said of the The Exorcist, “There is a power of evil in the very fabric of the film itself.” He may have...
The Blind Arcade
May 14, 20226 min read
Kick the Dog Until It Bites, Then Shoot It
"History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done." - Sidney...
The Blind Arcade
May 7, 202215 min read
Digital Enlistment
I watched a video on Twitter of a Russian tank rolling down an urban street somewhere in Ukraine. The man recording the video —...
The Blind Arcade
May 6, 20222 min read
Descent
There is a place in the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo. Named for Captain Nemo of H.G. Welles’ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it’s just...
The Blind Arcade
Apr 30, 20223 min read
The Kipple
The science fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote about something he called “the kipple.” He describes it as the tendency fo junk to...
The Blind Arcade
Apr 28, 20222 min read
Learn to Code
A few weeks ago I drove through an old town in the Appalachian Mountains, a town with an interstate offramp not too far away but not so...
The Blind Arcade
Apr 24, 20229 min read
An Introduction
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters." - Antonio Gramsci These writings are an...
The Blind Arcade
Apr 16, 20224 min read