Year: 2021

Rainbows. Dreams. Mist. With one verse alone, Xu successfully weaves an ethereal world where dreams and desire flourish in his poem “Taking Leave from Cambridge Again.” In the eyes of a poet, an ordinary pool filled with duckweeds can easily transform into an alluring rainbow which harbours our wildest desires. Perhaps such is the power of literature—it is the power to use simple language to envision another reality and transform our mundane reality into a radically exciting one. Yet, this ability to imagine—to dream—is often considered excessive in modern society, where everything is mostly governed by utilitarian metrics. In a world where success is measured by efficiency and productivity, what value can literature hold? It seems to embody the exact opposite: it is subjective (god forbid), occasionally abstract (how unfortunate) and often idealistic (yikes!). …

Peter Debruge of Variety is exactly right: “Wonder Woman 1984 accomplishes what we look to Hollywood tentpoles to do: It whisks us away from our worries, erasing them with pure escapism.” Indeed, the comic banality of the eighties-chic—permed hair, baggy suits, and neon unitards—is a welcome distraction from the tedium of COVID fatigue, eco-anxieties, and other afflictions of the postmodern capitalist condition. But WW84’s campy portrayal of a past so bright and beautiful advances a sinister “truth”: that this mad world is all that we deserve, that the status quo should be the true object of our desires—a desire for non-desire. …

Economic inequalities are widening. Consider inequality data from the World Bank or even recent work such as the landmark Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty. The consensus is clear: disparities in income and wealth have been increasing in many countries over the past few decades. Most of all, it has congregated greatly in the top 0.1%. In some countries, this 0.1% of individuals command more than the bottom 30% combined. Suffice to say, we now have the rise of the extremely wealthy—a new gilded age where certain individuals have the spending power and wealth accorded to the kings and rajas of past centuries.

Here, Llewllyn Carroll aims to properly introduce the view called Limitarianism, which, as its name suggests, argues that there should be an upper limit to the amount of income and wealth that a person can hold. He will show that this view is not as repugnant as some might think….

In Cebu, Philippines, most people would agree that Ayala Corporation “owns” a major part of the city, even calling these places by the company’s name. Ride a jeepney (minibus) with outsourcing workers, and there’s a good chance some of them will say “manaog lang ko sa Ayala”—I am dropping off at Ayala.

What does it mean when real estate developers start creating projects that span entire urban districts? How does the concentration of capital in business parks affect local communities? In The Diacritic’s first Think-piece, Joshua Vargas opens a two-part series to investigate this phenomenon….