Category: Otherwise
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Crime and Punishment, Men and God
Despite having a highly curtailed social media presence, news has reached me that Dostoevsky is in. I am told White Nights, his early career novella, was a bestseller in the UK the year before last. More darkly in recent years, right-wing influencers like Jordan Peterson have used his work to push their reactionary manosphere ideology…
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Vilém Flusser’s project against death
War Office, 4 February 2026, © 2026 Bobby Crosby This year will mark the 35th anniversary since the death of the Prague-born philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser, whom I quoted in a previous essay last summer. It is perhaps cliché today to dig up pre-internet media theorists and watch them seemingly predict Instagram (as…
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Towards the oneness of things
Lundy Sunset, 11 July 2025, © 2025 Bobby Crosby At dusk in a Devonian rainforest, besieged by owls and deer and ferns, I began reading the English translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009). It had been indirectly recommended to me, by way of finding it on my…
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Knowledge, morality, and inertia in Roadside Picnic
Presence, 5 December 2024, © 2024 Bobby Crosby My friend Edward Unwin recently sent me a copy of Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, two brothers who wrote some of the best-known Soviet science fiction outside of Russia from the late 1950s through to the 1980s. Famously, the novel inspired the 1979 film Stalker,…
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