Pop culture

I talk about the political effects of comics, the Internet, and other media, because I am an intersectional nerd.

Why Attack on Titan is the Alt-Right’s Favorite Manga

In this piece for The New Republic, I discuss the popular manga Attack on Titan, and the neo-Nazi fanbase it has accumulated.

I really like Attack on Titan. The point of the article, in my opinion, is that authorial intent is tricky, and declaring a piece of media “woke” or “not woke” is complicated. I tried to write a meditation on death of the author in the time of chan-boards, with Attack on Titan as a case study. Nazis think it’s Nazi propaganda. Isayama thinks it’s a personal story. I think it is, or at least it could be, a revolution of the once-colonized and a story that asks the difficult questions about repair.

Can the Left Win YouTube?

In this piece for The New Republic, I profile a popular cohort of left-wing content creators on YouTube.

I had been an obsessive fan of LeftTube for about 12 months before the piece ran: not its earliest days by any means, but before its creators really broke into the mainstream. I felt mild frustration that most media outlets had covered Natalie Wynn’s content from the angle of deradicalization, while largely ignoring her other content and the fascinating ecosystem to which she belonged. The hardest part of this piece was narrowing it down to just six creators to profile. I chose six of the most different people I could, to gesture at the vastness of the world. I hope I succeeded, though I will never live down the botched wording decision that implied that YouTuber Shaun is a skull.

The Sprawling, Empathetic Adventure of Saga

In this piece for The Atlantic, I review the groundbreaking representation and political content in the blockbuster graphic novel Saga.

When I read Saga for the first time, I thought it was a series that should be mandatory reading for scholars of identity politics, asylum claims, and political violence. I also thought that it should be mandatory reading for people who believed comics cannot tell stories with all the nuance of literary novel. I found Staples and Vaughan’s work to be arresting and important. I wrote this essay to try to say why.