Blade Runner
Viewers never question Deckard’s humanity… except, perhaps, during this scene.
Josh Glenn
Josh Glenn is a Kingston (NY)-based consulting semiotician. He is cofounder of the consultancy Semiovox, editor of the websites SEMIOVOX and HILOBROW, and founding editor of The MIT Press's proto-sf RADIUM AGE series. He is an adjunct instructor at RISD and convenor of the monthly online Semiofest Sessions. His books (as writer and/or editor) include The Idler's Glossary, Significant Objects, the family activities guide Unbored, and the 2025 anthology Before Superman: Superhumans of the Radium Age. In the ’90s, Josh published the intellectual zine/journal Hermenaut; in the 2000s, he was a founding staffer and columnist for the Boston Globe's IDEAS section.
Apocalypse Now
In the existential jungle, empathy makes a man fitter for survival. But at what price?
The Bad News Bears
In life, as in baseball, things can always get better. Or worse.
Nobrow Mickey
“It’s on America’s tortured brow / that Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow.”
Young and Innocent
It’s not about right vs. wrong, it’s about wit vs. shit.
Buckaroo Banzai
For one moment, it seemed as though the Eighties might turn out OK.
Seth’s Dominion
"I am still trying to approach my work with the same intentions I had as a child."
Sixties Backlash
Parody is an art form for "children who have had imposed upon them a meaningless iconography."
Meet the Semionauts
"Between the experiential cunning of the animal and the more self-disciplined and attentive cunning of the man."