John Hawkins

Australia

Journalist at Freelance

Freelance journalist. Poet.

Articles

The Chaos of Creation: An Interview with Emmalea Russo

1 week ago | counterpunch.org | John Hawkins

Emmalea Russo is a writer and astrologer. Her books of poetry are G, Wave Archive, Confetti, and Magenta. Recent work has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, Spike Art Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books. We spoke a while back by Zoom about art, cancel culture, and her new novel, Vivienne. Below is the edited transcript. John Hawkins: Emmalea, your novel Vivienne opens with a torrent of tweets and online vitriol—a cacophony that feels both surreal and painfully familiar.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been called the ‘AI Oppenheimer’ – but he dismisses concerns: AI is just ‘processing data’

1 week ago | inkl.com | John Hawkins

Review: The Thinking Machine – Stephen Witt (Penguin)Founded to produce video game graphics, Nvidia pioneered “parallel processing”: doing more than one thing at a time. It developed an electronic circuit board that can quickly perform many mathematical calculations, called a “graphics processing unit” (GPU). Then, Nvidia looked for other users who needed a lot of computing power.
Three Steps Forward, 10 Steps Back: George Floyd’s Murder and Aftermath

3 weeks ago | counterpunch.org | John Hawkins

Five years ago, George Floyd, an African American, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and called the cops. When the cops arrived they pulled Floyd from his vehicle and during the arrest threw him to the ground, where officer Derek Chauvin put his knee into Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds and ignored pleas of “I can’t breathe” by the suspect.
Now It’s Dark: Alex Gibney How on Big Money Bought the American Political System

1 month ago | counterpunch.org | John Hawkins

The Dark Money Game, the new two-part documentary from Alex Gibney, confirms the worst: America has all-but succumbed to the terminal cancer of corruption. It is difficult to say how much time is left, but that end is a certainty. Things fall apart: It’s scientific, goes the Talking Heads song. Gibney’s film is inspired by Jane Mayer’s book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
Amy by Julie Lamin

1 month ago | morningstaronline.co.uk | John Hawkins |Cheryl Sonnier |Julie Lamin

I DIDN’T know then that I was “clever”. Who does at 14? But most of us were smart enough to stay on the right side of Amy Conway. Tall, thin, bleach-blonde hair, Doc Martens and a green parka, she broke the school uniform rules, as if even the teachers were scared of her! We lived in fear of Amy calling a fight on us. She was hard, the toughest girl in school. That was her legend, her power.
Torturing Assange: An Interview with Andrew Fowler

2 months ago | johnmenadue.com | John Hawkins

Andrew Fowler is an Australian award-winning investigative journalist and a former reporter for the ABCs Foreign Correspondent and Four Corners programs. and the author ofThe Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Fight for Freedom. This is an updated edition of his 2011 account of the rise and political imprisonment of Assange. Much of that account explained how Assange seemingly inevitably moved toward an adversarial positioning against American imperialism abroad.
The Old Country New Again: Revisiting Keith Jarrett

Dec 13, 2024 | counterpunch.org | John Hawkins

Back in the mid-70s I had a friend who attended the New England Conservatory, a school for future musicians of all ilks — jazz, classical, guitar, sax, orchestration, composition, etc. My friend, Mark, was an Army brat whose father was a colonel stationed at Ft. Devens just 40 miles from Boston. He had shown great promise as a child of cultured parents who pushed him to excel in music.
On and Off in Life and Death

Nov 22, 2024 | counterpunch.org | John Hawkins

Less than a year after the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett put out his latest collection of quality ruminations on his life, titled I Was Thinking (2023), he died of interstitial lung disease in a bed at Maine Medical Center in Portland on April 19, 2024. He surely had an intimation of his nearing demise, as he spends some time in the Preface of his memoir, describing his recent visits into unconsciousness and the pull of death.
Questioning My Sanity After the Election Results

Nov 8, 2024 | counterpunch.org | John Hawkins

The re-ascension of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States of America for which we stand and salute the flag raises some serious questions about the legitimacy of democracy in the 21st century. A guy twice impeached, including for anti-democratic behavior, and convicted on 34 felonies, allowed to swear again he’s uphold the law of the land, hand on the bible for a god that’s dead. We bought in. MAGA can pray all it wants, but the God of dollar bills is dead. Trump will fix it instead.
Overshot and Kaput: Humankind Wears Out Its Welcome

Nov 6, 2024 | counterpunch.org | John Hawkins

When Noam Chomsky deflected questions about 9/11 — refused to speculate like a common theorist of conspiracies — but, in short, directed us to the Truth: We have bigger fish to fry and have to get to it ASAP. No doubt, he wouldn’t deny that there were such men in the world who would be happy to be Insiders with sticks of dynamite. That shit built the world we know.