News

Crowdsourcing My Next Book

Photographers: A call for six (6) photos, to be reproduced in black and white, as illustrations in a forthcoming Brazilian (Portuguese-only) anthology of my work, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and the Sexual Symbolism of Madonna’s Big Toe (Editora Sulina). The book will be launched at […]

Read more

On Leaving TRUE/SLANT

READ IT NOW, BEFORE IT’S REDACTED: “Goodbye to All This: On Leaving True/Slant.” TEASER: The unspoken goal, in too much American journalism, is not to tell people what they don’t know, or never even imagined they might want to know, but to tell people what they already know, since it logically follows that anything they […]

Read more

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES!

HELP WANTED NEEDED: A webdesigner with some coding skills (Movable Type, Perl) OR a coder with some design literacy. JOB DESCRIPTION: 1. Migrate the contents of my extensively built-out website (www.markdery.com) to a new, user-friendly, free-hosting platform such as WordPress, Blogger, MT, or Tumblr. (Your informed opinion on which platform is best will help determine […]

Read more

Grandpa Goth: Mark Twain Shows His Dark Side

WEEKEND UPDATE: Apparently, some Bronze-Age bible troll reported my Facebook link to this essay as “abusive,” presumably because Twain was an atheist and Huckleberry Finn, one of the most banned books in a nation that stinks to heaven of god-bothering, is the devil’s handiwork. Now, due to Facebook’s guilty-until-proven-innocent logic—a rule of thumb that wins […]

Read more

A Walden of the Mind

But seriously: the debate about publicness is too important to be left to prophets of a great big beautiful tomorrow. Join the bloodsport, HERE. PULLQUOTE: Is the pervasive resistance to untethering ourselves from our social worlds or disconnecting ourselves from the media drip, even for an instant, at root a fear of the emptiness in […]

Read more

Always Connect

WHAT: “Have We No Sense of Decency, Sir, at Long Last?: On Adult Diapers, Erectile Dysfunction, and Other Joys of Oversharing.” My TRUE/SLANT essay on the Death of Shame, the Plague of Oversharing, and the Frenzy of Social Networking in the Age of Always Connect. READ IT HERE. NUT GRAF: The totemic technologies of our […]

Read more

Kraken Rising

WHAT: “Cthulhu said it, I believe it, that settles it.” My H+ feature on the cephalopod meme, “Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot.” READ IT HERE. NUT GRAF: When the stars align, [H.P. Lovecraft’s monstrous squid god] Cthulhu will rise again to resume His dominion over the Earth, ushering in an age […]

Read more