Latest news with #AliceBolin
The Guardian
14-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Six great reads: the trouble with ‘great men', Fire Island's hedonistic party palaces and close encounters with Sly Stone
British progressives have suffered major setbacks in recent years, in both public opinion and court rulings. Was a backlash inevitable, and are new tactics needed, asks Gaby Hinsliff in this fascinating Long Read: 'On all sides, woke has become shorthand less for a set of widely accepted liberal beliefs than an associated style of highly online activism, seen as prone to denouncing opponents as morally evil, engaging in competitive victimhood and favouring performative protest over practical change.' Read more We're obsessed with narratives about powerful men and how they got that way. But our mania for founder myths obscures an ideology of inequality, writes author Alice Bolin for Guardian US's weekend Featured essay: 'The current billionaire class has more power than any human beings have ever had, and they wield it with remarkably little responsibility. Billionaires must be cut down to size through every means possible, from breaking up monopolies to tax reform to financial regulation to union drives. But we also need to stop swallowing these Great Man stories whole and recognise them for what they are: an ideology of dominance.' Read more Jonathan Haidt's book about why social media and smartphones have done, and are doing, to chillden's brains has become an international bestseller and a must-read for parents of young and teenage children. In this interview with David Shariatmadari he spoke about becoming a figurehead of the conversation about kids and technology and his playbook for fighting back against what he calls 'The Great Rewiring' of children's brains. Read more On 1 April 1945, US troops landed on Okinawa during their push towards mainland Japan, beginning a battle that lasted until late June. About 12,000 Americans and more than 188,000 Japanese died. In this beautifully designed report, Justin McCurry, the Guardian's Tokyo correspondent follows Takamatsu Gushiken on a mission to uncover as many remains of as many dead soldiers as possible, identify them and return them to their families. Justin also explores this story further in an accompanying documentary directed by Guardian photographer David Levene, titled The Bone Hunter. Read more Over the last century, Fire Island Pines, as the central square-mile section of this sandy spit is known, has evolved into something of a queer Xanadu. Now counting about 600 homes, it is a place of mythic weekend-long parties and carnal pleasure, a byword for bacchanalia and fleshy hedonism – but also simply a secluded haven where people can be themselves … ' Oliver Wainwright examines the architectural legacy of Horace Gifford, the architect who arrived there in 1960, aged 28 and bored with working in a dull office in Manhattan and determined to make his mark in the sand. Read more Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis had several close calls before he managed to secure his first interview with the legendary American musician, who died this week, including attempting to speak to him from a children's playground while on holiday in Cornwall. Here he recollects his conversations with a genius who burned brightly before spending decades in a drug-fogged wilderness: 'He achieved more in those six years than most artists achieve in their lifetime, making music of such quality and originality, such power and funkiness, that you suspect it will be played for the rest of time. If there is anything even remotely like it in the thousands of tracks he amassed in his later years, that is just a bonus.' Read more
New York Times
31-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- New York Times
The Apocalypse Is Here, and It's One Big Cult
CULTURE CREEP: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse, by Alice Bolin The modern age is overwhelming. There are so many things to look at, so many apps to track our calorie intake, our periods, what our friends and emotional-support celebrities are doing. There's so much suffering, so much trauma and so many men laundering myths of greatness in an effort to control our daily lives. How does an individual make sense of it all? According to Alice Bolin's new book of essays, 'Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse,' the answer is cult thinking. 'All the decisions are exhausting,' Bolin writes. 'Some part of us longs to cede control and have someone else tell us what to do.' And so we have, by and large, given in to lives 'shaped by groupthink and indoctrination.' In the process, we — every one of us, according to Bolin — have played right into the hands of a capitalist system looking to keep us complicit and wring our bank accounts dry. Bolin's first book of essays, 'Dead Girls,' explored the American obsession with victimized women. Now, Bolin turns her eye to the average American's social manipulation by industries that created everything from the 'startling regression' among women in the 1950s back into the confines of the home, to Gamergate and the rise of Donald Trump. In a world where our every data point is collected by tech giants, 'even our rage against the machine becomes just another way to feed the machine.' Bolin outlines the book's three main subjects as 'cults, corporate thought control and the end of the world as we know it,' and she covers these in seven roving essays all tied up in the Catch-22 of trying to exist as an individual in a hyperconnected age. Often these wanderings make it difficult for the reader to identify a central gathering point for Bolin's musings, though she manages to hit at some sharp truths. 'Foundering' excoriates the 'American mania for founder myths,' of which Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk are only the most modern iterations. 'The narrative impulse comes from our own epic origin story,' she writes of the founding fathers, 'whose inspiring opening salvo, a poetic ode to all men being created equal, was maybe more marketing than actual game plan.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
