A Brief Compendium of Vintage Opium Underworlds

I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, so if you’re reluctant to step inside the world of 19th century junkies, I suggest you close the door and choose something a little lighter and brighter from our menu. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here myself, stockpiling antique photographs that have survived from the Opium Age and ended up on the internet. In my years of hunting and gathering in the far corners of the web, I’ve always been stopped in my tracks by these images because they seem like such rare and almost unreal insights into late 19th century society.

- Messy Nessy Chic

 

Whose Nightmare Are We Living In: Orwell’s or Huxley’s?

Some books, with their seemingly timeless messages and warnings, never go out of fashion. During the COVID pandemic, for example, Albert Camus’s La Peste became so memetic that I had to ban my Keen On guests from talking about it in the recommended books feature at the end of the show. There are those twin pillars of 20th-century dystopianism, of course, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

And then there’s Neil Postman’s 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which warns that we can’t have both our Huxley and our Orwell and requires us to choose between them.

- Lit Hub