Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content
This essay for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue traverses arthouse cinema, Shein, and streaming to explore how the ‘technical image’ is changing the nature of meaning-making
Techno-futurists are selling an interplanetary paradise for the posthuman generation—they just forgot about the rest of us
Inside the cult of TESCREALism and the dangerous fantasies of Silicon Valley’s self-appointed demigods, for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue
Confronting emerging mythologies from the striptease to gang wars to ‘The Sims’
Document asked 15 critics to turn philosopher Roland Barthes’s 1950s magazine column on its head for its Spring/Summer 2024 issue
Second Life’s loyal users embrace its decaying software and no-fun imperfections
Inside the multiplayer virtual world of furries, glitchy landscapes, and digital slumlords, for Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue
The sincere glamor of Candy Darling
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue, the artist and trans starlet’s divahood is reconsidered five decades after her passing
Living among the City of the Dead in Colma, California
For Document’s Fall/Winter 23, writer Daniel Gumbiner explores life, death, and industry in the state’s largest necropolis
Resisting simulations of the self
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, McKenzie Wark grapples with society’s love for identity-making, imagining a future free from flags or labels
B-girls shoulder the history of breaking
Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue profiles the women at the forefront of breakdancing as it makes its way to the Olympic floor
Constance Debré on dirty freedoms
For Document’s Fall/Winter 2023 issue, the novelist muses on love and power across the prison window’s glass
The sacrament of the secondhand
Amid the crowds of the kilo sale, Shahidha Bari bears witness to the perennial art of passing down and picking up
Chasing the mirage of the “future city”
From Futurama to The Line, Mohamed Elshahed points to the failed promise of the smart metropolis, where yesterday’s dreams make up tomorrow’s nightmares
The thrills and perils of raw-dogging reality
Untethered from drugs, apps, and shoes, Christina Catherine Martinez charts a journey of physical and psychological undress to Mexico’s only nude beach
The seductive promise of finding home on the homepage
For Document’s Spring/Summer 2023 issue, Oliver Brown dissects how physical reality defines social interaction, from escalators to web browsers and the metaverse
Between illusion and the studied art of the tease, strip clubs are the last bastion of the American Dream
Rachel Rabbit White explores the strip club's enduring fantasy of social and sexual upward mobility, both on-stage and off
Behind crumbling highways and ghost towns lies the mythological freedom of the American road
Is the walkability-car divide another front in the so-called ‘culture wars’? Drew Zeiba explores the online proliferation of the new urbanist
Raw eggs, pink pills, and embodied identity: Online communities create their own proof in a vacuum of truth
Radical Liberal Online Activists and Right Wing Bodybuilders represent two poles of the political spectrum—but they are are each a product of the waning of...
New York was killing me: Seeking community in the city of cultural saturation
For Document’s tenth anniversary, Rahel Aima reflects on what New York gave to her, and why she left it
Living at Xanadu: Ten writers muse on Joan Didion’s literary legacy
Cynthia Zarin, Ira Silverberg, Fariha Róisín, and others reflect on the reach of the iconic American voice
