utopia

Ahoy! This is the Weekly Churn, where every Sunday I post about what I’ve been reading, watching, and thinking about over the previous week. This week got away from me, so it’s being posted on the Monday instead. Sandra Newman recently wrote in The Guardian about how the literary genre of the utopia has been largely abandoned in favour of its shadow genre, the dystopia. For some reason she believes this shift to be in part the result of the Soviet Union under Stalin being the only real-world utopian project people have had to examine,[ref]While the communist revolution in Russia may have been a utopian project, the Soviet Union under Stalin was not; it was the consolidation of power in the hands of a monster. There is an argument to be made that totalitarianism is a utopian political philosophy, but I don’t agree. But there are genuine, and more recent,… Continue Reading →