There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.

To speak of the healing qualities of art, nature, colour and beauty, is to miss the mark profoundly when displaying an artist whose experience of life was so unremittingly bleak. While art and colour may have brought meaning to van Gogh’s life, it offered little by way of solace. It takes a very adept capitalist sleight of hand to turn his story into a lesson on “healing.”

Despite the ubiquity of a legal and safer supply of alcohol⁠, beverage alcohol contributes to the deaths of some three million people around the world every single year via traumatic injuries, chronic diseases, self-harm, cancers, and alcohol use disorders, including alcohol dependency. Countless more people live with alcohol-related diseases, chronic pains, mental health issues, and various disabilities.

Cyberpunk 2077 may have squandered an opportunity to provoke thought, but cyberpunk never had the power to save us. A slick, shiny new computer game is no replacement for supporting your community, organizing in your workplaces and challenging the powers of capital wherever they rear their heads. Power stays with us as long as we have the strength, will and vision to use it.

The launch of a basic income for artists has been hailed as “the most significant positive moment for Irish arts since the foundation of the Arts Council over 70 years ago.” Up to 2,000 artists will receive €325 per week for three years under the pilot, a sign of a “seismic shift” in attitudes towards the arts among politicians and the public over the past two years, advocates say.

In Twin Peaks: The Return, the evils of empire bubble up in ways that are peculiar and scary, but which always point irrevocably toward a sense of decline. In many ways, the season is a lament for American imperialism, and the pile of victims it has accrued on its single-minded drive toward the annihilation of its enemies, which will ultimately lead to the annihilation of itself.

Shang-Chi’s diasporic achievements in representation, both in its cast and crew, are remarkable considering the long history of anti-Asian racism in the Western film industry. The film’s Asian identity is international, undeniable, and unwieldy, revealing weaving histories that bring to question the limits to liberal representation and its expressions in the film industry today.

Two of America’s best songwriters released new albums during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first was Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, a deep-dive into the sickness of American society. The second is Lana Del Rey’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club. Over eleven new songs and one cover, Del Rey presents a starkly different image of America and what it means to exist, navigate, and create in these difficult and confusing times.

With the arts facing a host of market failures, the promise of disruption and decentralization offered by 2021’s buzziest acronym—NFTs, or non-fungible tokens—seems messianic to a nascent class of techno-optimists who seem eager to come to the aid of the starving artists among us. Unfortunately, however, NFTs look to be more like an expression of venture capitalism and commodification than a salve to the world’s ailing creative industries.

On the fortieth anniversary of Reagan’s inauguration, it is worth contemplating the lasting effects of his administration’s policies on communities throughout the United States. No Country for Old Men presents this shift as a modern reincarnation of the inhuman brutality and rugged individualism of the Wild West. With today’s unprecedented socioeconomic inequality, it is an analysis that grows only more prescient with time.