Articles & Essays
When he isn't in the Operating Theatre or in consultation with patients, the Doctor busies himself with producing acute cultural commentaries which are often only available in alternative publications (or here at the Clinic). The articles here range over the last four decades and were, in several cases, ahead of their time.
- Politics as Fashion as Politics - Ask not for whom the pendulum swings. [1979]
- Islam as Other - Islam holds up a mirror to the secular West. [1985]
- Hip: R.I.P. - Giving up on staying hip as middle age encroached [1988]
- Spies R Us - the information society is turning us all into intelligence agents [1994]
- Esotericism - do esoteric spiritual traditions really exist? [1991]
- jane siberry live - a 1993 review of a 'non-concert' by one of our great contemporary singers [1993]
- Private Revolution - a blow-by-blow account of one of the world's most futile demonstrations [1992]
- New Age Critique - looking for redeeming qualities in a heap of dolphin mugs [1989]
- The Return of Baal - are the Elder Gods returning from the Depths? [1985]
- Digital Politics 101 - the complete, unedited rant that was trimmed down into WIRED's "Anarcho-Emergentist Republicans" [1995]
- If Software Companies Ran the Country... - Is that fine print fiddling with instituting new property relations? [1987]
- The Pornographic Impulse - That nude photo is only the tip of the iceberg. [1988]
- The Disharmonic Convergence - The far left and far right as strange political bedfellows. [1988]
- Beyond Left and Right - A much later (Summer 2000) consideration of the drawbacks of left-right thinking. This was the intro to an issue on that theme that I guest-edited for Whole Earth Review. [2000]
- Careful What You Wish For - A review of Sexual Alchemy by Donald Tyson [2000]
- Jack the Ripper, "From Hell" - Why the 2001 movie about the Ripper murders was fantasy, not history. [2001]
- The Political Gnosis of Philip K. Dick - Cosmic alienation and political alienation meet in Dick's life and writing. [2002]
- Magic and Awakening - A review of Introduction to Magic by Julius Evola and the UR Group. [2001]
- The Islamic Dilemma and the Sufi Message - A post-9/11 look at conflicting approaches to Islam. [2001]
- Lessons Still Unlearned: "The Weather Underground," Thirty Years Later - A review of the 2003 documentary film on the WUO. [2003]
- Mr. Evola's Wild Ride - a review of Julius Evola's Ride the Tiger (Inner Traditions) [2003]
- Review of Zeitgeist, The Movie - BoingBoing asked me to review an online video smash and a few feathers were ruffled. [2007]
- The Conspiracy Boom - Spiked by Salon, this essay investigating the present growth in conspiracy-awareness ran at BoingBoing as a follow-up to the Zeitgeist kerfluffel. [2007]
- Spinning One's Wheels for the Revolution - A review of Love and Revolution (AK Press) [2013]
- Shhh! It's a Secret! Grappling with the Puzzle of Freemasonry - Just what's the deal here? [2013]
- Playing Those Mind Games - the Psychedelic Revolution Reconsidered [2015]
- God Only Knows - Pondering the imponderable [2015]
- Reds and Feds - What the FBI's war on the Maoist fringe tells us about the surveillance state [2016]
- Where Did Trump Come From? - A new history of the American right sheds light on the GOP in 2016. [2016]