Last January, in yet another sign, perhaps, of the shifting weather patterns and intensified storm systems caused by global warming, a fierce snowstorm stranded hundreds of motorists along a 50-mile…
Contemporaries Essays
Stuck with Each Other: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora is many things, but you might, if you’re very irritated, characterize it as a very long book about how hard it is to be…
Icebound, Not Down
An icebound ship is a stuck ship — or so Heroic Age polar exploration accounts would have it. The best-known facts about the best-known historical polar expeditions (the Northwest Passage…
Stuck in the Future (of the Past)
When I started writing this, in mid-June of 2022, it was 100 degrees in central Illinois. A “heat dome” had settled over much of the United States — it was…
Introduction to Stuckness
Stuckness might be the prevailing affect of late modernity. In contrast to the humanities’ valorization of sustained attention to the nuance of textuality, or to the accelerated demands on our…
The Age of Anesthesia
Heterosexuality is undergoing a major public relations crisis. From Gallup polls proclaiming Gen Z as the “queerest generation ever” to reactionary pundits inveighing against the death of traditional family values,…
Femcel Heteropessimism
Femcels — the female version of involuntary celibates, or, “incels” — are rapidly gaining visibility and attention, as evidenced by the recent uptick in femcel related content on social media…
How do we write about love of cock?
There’s something embarrassing, shameful, about enormous desire: cuntstruck, dick-drunk, dickmatized, down bad. So much work goes into pretending to be more upright, less addicted, than we really are. When I…
The Rom-Com is Dead, Long Live the Rom-Com
About twenty-five minutes into Joachim Trier’s 2021 film The Worst Person in the World, protagonist Julie is leaving a party where her boyfriend was being annoying. She is enjoying a…