Kristian Williams

I have a short essay on Hooded Utilitarian about Red Dawn — the original and the remake.  In it, I argue that the politics of the films are more complicated than they first appear, and I ask how it is that we come to interpret political propaganda.

Meanwhile, I’ve written a more straightforward review of the recent World War 3 Illustrated collection.  It appeared in the Progressive Populist last month.

And I’ve written a couple short news notices for DCSC.ws.  One provides an overview of the July-August Monthly Review, on “surveillance capitalism.”  The other points to the Edge City Collective‘s analysis of the geography of repression in Ferguson.

In These Times recently hosted a discussion on police brutality, the Ferguson riots, and the possibilities — and limits — of police reform.  I took part, alongside Frank Chapman, an organizer with the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, Frederick Collins, a Chicago cop and mayoral candidate, and Jessica Stites, ITT‘s web editor and facilitator for the conversation.

The ITT piece follows a similar discussion I was part of on the Marc Steiner Show, and an interview I did with KBOO, both last month.

I gave a couple of interviews on the recent events in Ferguson, and the myriad issues it raised: police violence, racial profiling, zero-tolerance policing, militarization, crowd control, and the various forms resistance can take.

The first was a roundtable discussion on the Marc Steiner Show in Baltimore.  The other guests were a retired cop and a community activist.  The conversation didn’t go the way I expected, in part because no one tried to defend the police, and in part because I was outflanked from the left.

The second was a one-on-one interview with KBOO’s Bill Resnick in Portland.  Among other things we talked about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s essay in Time, “The Coming Race War Won’t be about Race.”  The interview is titled “Our Enemies in Ferguson,” which I think is pretty clever.

I turned 40 this year, so to get my revenge against time I wrote an essay about adolescence and a short story about middle-aged punks.

The first looks at the superhero tropes in Donnie Darko and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and considers how they relate to psychosis as well as normal teenage angst.  It ran at The Hooded Utilitarian.

The second is a dialogue about aging and authenticity.  You can find it at Verbicide.com.