Almost everyone in modern America is now familiar with phrases like “white privilege,” “oppression,” “appropriation” and so on—and almost everyone is also keenly aware that these terms simply weren’t part of the mainstream social discourse up until a few years ago. What changed? Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s new book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody is a sustained attempt to “name the elephant”—to accessibly systematize the contemporary currents of social-justice... Read more

It’s been a number of months since I finished Eugene McCarraher’s behemoth book The Enchantments of Mammon, but I continue to find myself compelled by its tantalizing, subversive thesis. McCarraher argues, at great length, that modern finance capitalism is not, as it purports to be, merely a neutral scientific approach to reality; rather, it is its own ontology, one that sneaks in metaphysical commitments in its talk of value and quantification and commodities. What’s more, McCarraher submits, this picture of the world... Read more

A few months ago, Reformed writer Aimee Byrd kicked up a minor firestorm in the confessional Presbyterian corner of the internet with her most recent book—the provocatively titled Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. In context, it’s hard to imagine a clearer shot across the bow. No discussion of evangelical theology of gender can ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and its foundational text Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. New Calvinist leading... Read more

Earlier this week, I came across an unusually compelling article on the video game commentary website Polygon. In “Games Need to Return to Black-and-White Morality,” Khee Hoon Chan levels a sharp critique of the tendency of contemporary video games—but, more broadly, pop culture as a whole—to place moral ambiguity at the center of their narratives, thereby blurring the distinction between hero and villain. (There’s a reason so many pop-culture antagonists remind their opponents, when in the throes of final confrontation,... Read more

This Independence Day weekend, I dusted off what’s perhaps my favorite video game of all time—2013’s BioShock Infinite—and gave it a spin for the first time in six years. Graphics aside, the game really doesn’t feel like it’s aged very much. In fact, it feels perhaps more timely now than it did upon release. BioShock Infinite follows private investigator Booker DeWitt on his journey to the floating city of Columbia, a breakaway American state in thrall to a particularly toxic form... Read more