“It’s not about art,” proclaimed an anonymous local communist in big red letters on the wall of an apartment building across the street. I think the sheer political utility of the damn thing appealed to me in the moment. I found myself crossing the street patiently waiting out the lady with the bicycle and child blocking my view so I could snap a picture.

“We don’t spray-paint shit for aesthetic reasons.”

It took me back to the day I started paying more attention to the graffiti around the central Berlin district where I’ve lived for the past few years. My…

It’s hard to keep a straight face when watching coverage of the talks between the United States and China in Anchorage. The statements made by the U.S. delegation so far are as arrogant as they are divorced from reality. To have Tony Blinken sit there and scold China on its foreign policy while claiming that the U.S. intends to defend the prevailing “rules-based order” is peak tragicomedy. What rules-based order?

These statements come just after the United States illegally bombed the sovereign nation of Syria after rocket attacks on its military bases in Iraq, a country it illegally invaded back…

I spoke with a friend living in Myanmar about a month ago. She talked about how people in her city were coming out to their balconies every night, banging pots and pans as a show of resistance to the military coup that wrested control of the country from the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1st, 2021. That was in the early days of the protests when the military, seemingly caught off guard by the scale of resistance to its power-grab, was still figuring out what to do and mobilizing its forces against the demonstrators.

The military’s…

I was around 10 years old, digging through one of the bargain bins at Wal-Mart, not knowing that this moment would send me on a journey to Valhalla. My mom had scraped together the money to get us our first home computer. It was a sleek beast cruising along at 75 MHz with a beefy 4 megs of RAM. I’m not sure how much debt we took on to grab this piece of hardware, but it was probably crippling. Not really knowing anything about PC gaming, I pulled out a disc that looked both promising and affordable: 1001 Games for…

As someone who really enjoyed the stories in Greek mythology as a kid, I’m impressed with what Supergiant Games has done with the setting. The writers of Hades deserve credit for their thoughtful handling of the source material. They’ve managed to re-work these old stories for our current culture; on many occasions, they’ve challenged traditional versions of these myths without the whole thing feeling forced. The setting isn’t just superficial window-dressing. It’s not just painted Greek as an excuse to fight ax-wielding Minotaurs (although that is a thing). The larger-than-life figures from antiquity are used to explore the intricacies and…

“Of course American fascism would have a merchandising tie-in,” I found myself typing into the live stream comments as the camera panned over endless rows of MAGA merch tables at last week’s fascist insurrection. The stream went to a shot of a sea of kitted-out Trump supporters, and I thought about all of the things people must be making some sweet bank on: “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, guns, bullets, plus-size tactical vests, bear mace, and, of course, the ubiquitous American flags. …

It’s 2005 and I’m staying with my grandparents in their Warsaw apartment for the summer. I’m in my second year of university and this is all a bit of an experience for me. I had not been back to Poland since the third grade. Growing up, we never had enough money to make regular trips here from our home in Winnipeg, Canada. For much of my life, my grandparents had just been voices inside a phone.

It’s sometime in the vicinity of noon. I get out of bed and head to the kitchen, where my grampa is sitting at the…

I woke up last week to news of massive protests in Poland. The unrest comes after the right-wing government under the Law and Justice Party (PiS) used the constitutional court to institute a ban on abortions in the case of fetal defects. These types of procedures have, up until now, made up 98% of all abortions performed in Poland annually. The ruling then, functions as a de facto ban on abortions as they are now only permitted in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother.

This round of unrest brings to mind the umbrella-wielding protesters who took to…