Geoff Shullenberger

New York

Managing Editor at Compact

Managing editor @compactmag_.

Articles

Right-Wing Victim Power

2 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

In a recent Financial Timesfeature, the literary scholar Orlando Reade traces a phenomenon that has also been of interest to me for over a decade: the influence of René Girard on a growing subset of the American right. The starting point of Reade’s discussion is the conversion experience of sorts that JD Vance experienced at a 2011 speech given by Peter Thiel at Yale Law School.
On ‘Attention Capitalism’

3 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

I haven’t followed Chris Hayes’s career all that closely, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen his show, but my general prejudices about MSNBC hosts didn’t lead me to expect all that much when I got a review copy of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
On ‘Attention Capitalism’

3 weeks ago | substackfwd.xyz | Geoff Shullenberger

I haven’t followed Chris Hayes’s career all that closely, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen his show, but my general prejudices about MSNBC hosts didn’t lead me to expect all that much when I got a review copy of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
The Crisis of Liberalism (Part 3): The Trans-ing of the Political Subject

3 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger |Ashley Frawley

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:15:53Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Ashley Frawley joins Geoff Shullenberger to discuss her Compact column, "How Society Got a Sex Change," and its relevance to the evolution of liberalism.
The Prospects of Anti-Woke Capital

4 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

Various of the Trump administration’s initiatives of the past three months seem to have been informed by a class theory of politics derived from the work of James Burnham and his intellectual progeny. The theory is roughly the following: “Woke” is the ideology of the managerial class; therefore, the way to defeat woke is to go after the institutions that sustain that class.
The Prospects of Anti-Woke Capital

4 weeks ago | substackfwd.xyz | Geoff Shullenberger

Various of the Trump administration’s initiatives of the past three months seem to have been informed by a class theory of politics derived from the work of James Burnham and his intellectual progeny. The theory is roughly the following: “Woke” is the ideology of the managerial class; therefore, the way to defeat woke is to go after the institutions that sustain that class.
Cronenberg Beyond the Grave

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

It has been a big few weeks for Canada. Just before the Liberal Party returned to power in Ottawa under the globalist technocrat Mark Carney on the basis of an improbable revival of Canadian nationalism, one of the country’s greatest living artists has bequeathed us another great work.
The Covert Theology of ChatGPT

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

I’ll be brief today, as I’m currently in Boulder, Colo., participating in a conference on “Renegade Futurism.” I’ll be speaking on a panel later about “AI as God,” which prompted me to revisit some things I’ve written about AI over the years. In lieu of a full post, I will republish a few parts of a newly relevant old essay on the subject, along with some brief framing remarks. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication.
From the War on Terror to the War on Covid-and Back Again

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

A good deal of my writing in the years 2020-22 involved revisiting material I had studied in graduate school in a particular historical moment—the final years of George W. Bush’s administration and the first years of Barack Obama’s—and applying it to a new moment, that of the pandemic and its political fallout, which both resembled the prior one and did not. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The Great Neoliberal Novelist

1 month ago | compactmag.com | Geoff Shullenberger

In a controversial 1986 essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” the late literary critic Frederic Jameson argued that while the literature of the industrialized West had largely retreated from its political vocation, that wasn’t true of the great writers of the developing world.