Boucher has recently seemed at a loss to regain control over her career, and naive about her role in its dissolution. But Miss Anthropocene reveals an astute understanding – evidently well honed – of humanity’s worst impulses and how to appeal to them. […] Against all odds, Miss Anthropocene is a beautiful and emotionally complex album: Boucher’s continuing personal testament to creativity as resistance against destruction, and an unlikely optimistic gesture that still believes art can be a powerful force for social good. It also finally finds Boucher reconciled to her relationship with the public. On Miss Anthropocene, she is a mirror, inviting us to examine the source of our bad faith.

Notes on Kim Kardashian and the most important videogame of 2014. Anyway, high/low, camp/class, feminism/exploitation: It’s all breaking down. The digital revolution has made our hierarchies diffuse, and in some cases, defunct. So while Kim may be seen as a sign of end times to those who feel they must protect some temple of good taste, she has become something of a folk hero to a new generation that doesn’t see old-guard institutions as anything but obstacles to disrupt and shatter.

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

I wish for my own voice what Aretha’s has had from the beginning: a sense of self so strong that she had to open her mouth and sing to keep from exploding, to keep herself whole.

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

Jim Carrey as a genius, the "representative jester of our time." "Carrey’s dream sequence of movies is a prophecy, a warning that this clanking ego-apparatus in which each of us walks around, this fissured, monumental self, half Job and half Bertie Wooster, cannot be sustained. Out of his own seemingly bottomless disquiet, Carrey writhes and reaches into the bottomless disquiet of his audience."