A provocative history of Disney’s rise to cultural dominance, pulling skeletons from the corporate closet to decode the political messages hidden in all of your favorite childhood movies.In The Extended Universe, Vicky Osterweil takes us on a quest to discover how Disney’s “imagineers” have made it impossible to reflect on the wonders of growing up without thinking of Disney's movies, amusement parks, and merchandising. Drawing on extensive interviews with...

Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production.Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis.Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and ...

A fresh argument for rioting and looting as our most powerful tools for dismantling white supremacy.Looting -- a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods -- is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement.But Vicky Osterweil argues that stealing goods and destroying prope...

A fresh argument for rioting and looting as our most powerful tools for dismantling white supremacy.Looting -- a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods -- is one of the more extreme actions that can take place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement.But Vicky Osterweil argues that stealing goods and destroying prope...

In these troubled times, even the most pessimistic diagnosis of our future ends with an uplifting hint that things might not be as bad as all that, that there is light at the end of the tunnel.Yet, argues Slavoj Žižek, it is only when we have admitted to ourselves that our situation is completely hopeless - that the light at the end of the tunnel is in fact the headlight of a train approaching us from the opposite direction - that fundamental change can be brought about.Sur...

"Vitally important, devastatingly thorough, and shockingly revealing…. After reading Primetime Propaganda, you'll never watch TV the same way again."—Mark LevinMovie critic Michael Medved calls Ben Shapiro, "One of our most refreshing and insightful voices on the popular culture, as well as a conscience for his much-maligned generation." With Primetime Propaganda, the syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and ...

Today, hundreds of thousands of people, desperate to escape war, violence and poverty, are crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Our response from our protected European standpoint, argues Slavoj Zizek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible; or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions are bad, states Zizek. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackling it.The refugee crisis also presents an opport...

Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her multi-award-winning talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is currently North America's only black...

Fear of cancel culture has gripped the world, and it turns out to be an old fear in a new get-up.In this incisive new work, Adrian Daub analyzes the global spread of cancel culture discourse as a moral panic, showing that, though its object is fuzzy, talk of cancel culture in global media has become a preoccupation of an embattled liberalism. There are plenty of conservative voices who gin up worries about cancel culture to advance their agendas. But more remarkabl...

**"[E]xcellent and deeply reported." —Tim Wu, New York Times Book Review"The first major biography of tech’s newest titan, this sets a high bar for those to follow." —Publishers Weekly, starred review"An exemplary blend of biography, financial technology reportage, and futurology." —Kirkus, starred reviewFrom an acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter comes the first biography of the enigmatic leader of the AI revolution, charting ...

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition - of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheter...

Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers.In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the 'attention merchants', contributing to the distr...