Severance
Story Stream
A Powerless Form March 07, 2025
The Australian writer Jessica Zhan Mei Yu and I spent several months exchanging emails about her 2023 novel, But the Girl, and the affinities between postcritique and contemporary fiction. We first met in 2019 when I was giving a talk at the Universi...
How “Severance” Makes a Fetish of the Office March 07, 2025
When “Severance” premièred, in 2022, it felt like an absurdist parable about the alienation of labor—a moody, eerie critique of technocapitalism that seemed in keeping with our age of “upskilling” and A.I. The four main characters worked at Lumon, a ...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
High Infidelity March 04, 2025
Sunday’s Oscars ceremony was a productive night for The Brutalist, which scooped up the statuettes for cinematography, score, and best actor. Since the film’s release late last year, the deluge of acclaim for Brady Corbet’s epic, three-and-a-half hou...
‘Severance’ Gets the Internet February 13, 2025
In Episode 3 of this season of Severance, Mark and his sister, Devon, have an idea. They need to ask Mark’s innie a question, but Lumon’s famous code detectors make this impossible. Nothing with any letters or symbols on it can pass through the eleva...
DOGE and the Backlash to the Backlash February 12, 2025
Late last week, Elon Musk announced that the initiative he’s heading up, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would rehire Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer who was fired after a Wall Street Journal story unearthed several offensive X ...
The Ghettoization of Western Civilization in Universities February 05, 2025
In December, Inside Higher Education published a profile of the new School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The essay examines the research specialties and intellectual affiliations of several facu...
'Severance' Season 2 Is the Best Show on TV January 17, 2025
Expectations can destroy a good TV show. For most new series, the first season is all about grabbing attention, introducing a group of characters people actually want to spend time with, and telling a good story. If that debut season succeeds? Well, ...
‘Severance’ Is Finally Back January 15, 2025
At 3:04 a.m. on May 24, 2010, Dan Erickson logged on to Facebook and updated his status with nine simple words: “Dear Lost. It was perfect. Thank you. Love, Dan.”Lost had aired its series finale earlier that night, bringing to a close six seasons of ...
Bad Bunny Phoned Home January 14, 2025
Last month, Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny was navigating a holiday-season flutter of activity, including a giveaway for disadvantaged youth in his hometown, when most of his country was plunged into darkness for several hours. The blackout threate...
Don’t Mourn the Fact-Checkers January 10, 2025
The Great American Vibe Shift, rapidly reshaping U.S. culture and politics, has landed at 1 Hacker Way—the gleaming Palo Alto headquarters of Meta. In a video this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to content polic...
The Anti-Social Century January 09, 2025
The Bar Is ClosedA short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in with my wife and daughter. The place was ...
How to Storm and Save an Ivory Tower January 07, 2025
Not until quite recently did American colleges cease being free expression zones. After University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom sounded the alarm with his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and...
