By Eric Le Roy
El Conejito
I guess the frenzy is fading now, but (as usual, a day late and a dollar short) I would like to record a few belated thoughts on the recent Super Bowl in America. Not the game itself, mind you, which by all accounts was as boring as an argument between two dead people, but the Half Time Show, featuring an enterprising dude with … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
I have a simple, possibly impolite thesis: the “nation” is a beautiful story we tell to coordinate strangers, and loud nationalism is what people reach for when the story stops paying their bills. Nations are not ancient tribes waking from deep time; they are recent inventions—clever ones—that industrial print, schools, and armies stitched together so we would feel kinship with people we will never meet. That is not an insult; … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 21+ Artem’s recent article “Borders, Bogeymen, and Billion Dollar Boosts” deserves a thorough response. I say this because in many areas his reasoning is beyond reproach and his data irrefutable. If I may presume to put a few words into his mouth (for what follows is neither a quote nor a paraphrase), I would say that the thesis of one aspect of his essay … Read the rest
