Vampires: a structural analysis

Daniel R. Smith

A homage to the memory of Christopher Lee. Dracula.

In his recent The Utopia of Rules (2015), David Graeber has – somewhat unwittingly but completely fortuitously – given popular voice and defence to a structural analysis in popular culture. His analysis of fantasy novels, films, TV shows and video-games as the fantasy-escape, but ultimately inverted yet homologous bureaucratic universe, to our working lives is surely one of the best diagnoses for the secret pleasure, and utopian fantasy to our everyday bureaucratic existences. Science fiction is the new social realism (Jameson, 2013).

Helicopter or hands-off: today’s parents can’t seem to win

By Jennie Bristow.

Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University in California, has criticised “highly educated parents and academic schools” for producing, in the words of a Sunday Times headline, a “generation of no-copers” who achieve perfect grades in school but “cannot cope with the real world”.