By: Matthew Battles

Is Call of the Wild truly feral? Or merely fascist?

By: Matthew Battles

THE STAR TREK MYTHOS hosts one of the most flourishing bodies of fan fiction since Euripides and the boys got busy on Homer back in the day (indeed, Trekkies ushered in the modern fan fiction […]

By: Matthew Battles

WHY DO WE go to the woods, where the wild things are? Because it’s where the wild things are. Lars von Trier’s forthcoming film ANTICHRIST will debut at Cannes this May. Von Trier may be […]

By: Matthew Battles

MELDING ‘PATA­PHYSICS and popular mechanics, Proust and power tools, Dada and do-it-yourself, Eric Kraft is a hilobrow novelist par excellence. With the publication of his latest novel, Flying Home, Kraft’s cracked mythology is arguably complete […]

By: Matthew Battles

MARGARET and CHRISTINE WERTHEIM are crocheting a coral reef, and they’re eager for help. The sisters direct the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, which supports lectures, publications, and projects that explore the “figurative ecology” […]

By: Matthew Battles

The art of Thomas Doyle is at once inviting and unsettling. Miniature tableaux under glass, his pieces have the quirky, lilliputian charm of the model railroad, the dollhouse, and the museum diorama. But upon further […]

By: Matthew Battles

Today, at long last, I saw the Ether Dome. It’s not a fan remix of a Mad Max movie, nor is it a fancifully named head shop. One of Boston’s most neglected historic sites, the […]

By: Matthew Battles

National Geographic News reports that the skull of a plague victim unearthed near Venice exhibits an unmistakable hallmark of treatment for vampirism. The woman’s mouth was forced open by a brick — a measure that […]

By: Matthew Battles

Julian Dibbell, anthropologist of the tribes of technology, has written an entertaining and useful consideration of kittens. Specifically, he’s writing about the viral video Kittens Inspired by Kittens, in which a young girl re-enchants the […]