Mid Theory Collective

Love this idea and encourage my HS pedagogy people to follow along!

Unwanted Reading: A Review of Tom Comitta’s ‘People’s Choice Literature’ The Sunday before I taught Beloved last spring, I sat on my couch wondering how I was going to convince a room full of second semester seniors that, before they left high school that June, they sho…

There is also @johndownesangus.bsky.social incredible essay on why it matters to teach difficult books in high school and why "Now seems like a particularly terrible time to give up on trying to help students develop meaningful relationships with books."

Seeing Without Guarantees What seemed to be intimidating the students was not the idea that I wanted something specific from them and they didn’t know what it was or how to give it to me, but rather, precisely, that I didn’…

You can also revisit some of the excellent pedagogy pieces we have previously published, including Sam Catlin's moving and precise meditation of John Berger's Ways of Seeing and the power of sitting with open-ended questions.

The Questioning Spirit: Bringing Visual Dramaturgy into the Classroom What if we understand text as a multi-faceted, dynamic object in which design and embodiment already lurk? The definition of dramaturgy is in constant flux, often dependent on the person or people …

MTC is launching a pedagogy section, where we invite our colleagues to reflect on a question, an assignment, an activity, an experience, a challenge, or a joy they have had in the classroom. To kick off, Alec Abramson, a recent college graduate, discusses his adventures with "dramaturgy design."

This episode opens with an extraordinary—if also utterly banal, routine—story of a professional ethical lapse told by @bakaari.bsky.social, which you must hear. It's in the first four minutes. But you won't want to stop after that.

A review of a book by someone who has given us money More people should take a silly thing really seriously, for years and years and years, and then call it a book and throw a party. What else is the point of being alive?

Some friendly corruption from us!

This is just another way of saying that I love mixed methods work, I guess. Archival research? Yes! Data collection? Yes! Quantitative analysis? Yes! Close reading? Yes! Case studies? Yes! Theoretical speculation? Yes! Let’s do it all why not

Sold for Parts: ‘Left-Handed Girl’ and Taiwan’s Markets These are the choices given to a young girl: you can aspire to normality by “correcting” the evil thing within you, embrace evil and do bad things, or live with the constant assertion that you are …

For MTC, our contributing writer Charline Jao writes about Shih-Ching Tsou’s new film LEFT-HANDED GIRL and the melodrama of late capitalism.

Illustrations by MTC Contributing Illustrator Carolyn Jao

Sold for Parts: ‘Left-Handed Girl’ and Taiwan’s Markets These are the choices given to a young girl: you can aspire to normality by “correcting” the evil thing within you, embrace evil and do bad things, or live with the constant assertion that you are …

"There is a lose-lose conundrum: male characters repeatedly make each female character’s life harder in some way (debt, romantic disappointment, etc.), yet the absence of a patriarch or “protector” is its own burden." Catch Charline Jao on Shih-Ching Tsou’s new film!

Sold for Parts: ‘Left-Handed Girl’ and Taiwan’s Markets These are the choices given to a young girl: you can aspire to normality by “correcting” the evil thing within you, embrace evil and do bad things, or live with the constant assertion that you are …

For MTC, our contributing writer Charline Jao writes about Shih-Ching Tsou’s new film LEFT-HANDED GIRL and the melodrama of late capitalism.

Illustrations by MTC Contributing Illustrator Carolyn Jao

Our colleagues at Lateral Journal are working on a special issue, titled "Performance Between Post-Truths." Check out their CfP at the link below and consider submitting.

What Do We Want from a Protest Song? For a genre that confronts the horrors of the present, the protest song of 2026 is curiously backward-looking.

For @newyorker.com, I wrote about Bruce Springsteen and also the guy from Staind: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

For the Saturday crowd.

Astray: A Reading Journal The following conversation emerges from the authors’ reading group’s discussion of Tsai Ming-Liang’s film, Walker (2012). Tsai Ming-Liang is a Malaysian-Taiwanese director, part of Taiw…

For MTC, a reading group reflects on Tsai's WALKER, the literature & legacy of the flâneur, and why thinking needs straying.

"After metaphysics, the monk becomes the aesthete; the empty space left behind by the death of God is filled up by art, literature, and, of course, Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema."

I ordered this book because of the review. Just a shout out to book reviews.

Peek Behind the Curtain: A CASUAL Theatre Post-Mortem I wonder what happened in the dressing room(s)? Did they all share one? What did we miss? In theatre, a “post-mortem” is the practice of evaluating a show once it has closed. It is a time for the c…

Today we have such a cool practice-focused piece out! The talented folks of Los Angeles Performance Practice let us peek behind the curtain and eavesdrop into one of their post- mortem conversations. It's also an experiment in coauthorship, with the Co-Directors of LAPP speaking as one voice! 🎭

Book clubs! This essay was so interesting—and I can’t wait to read the book. More convos about reading and what it means for all of us.

Peek Behind the Curtain: A CASUAL Theatre Post-Mortem I wonder what happened in the dressing room(s)? Did they all share one? What did we miss? In theatre, a “post-mortem” is the practice of evaluating a show once it has closed. It is a time for the c…

Today we have such a cool practice-focused piece out! The talented folks of Los Angeles Performance Practice let us peek behind the curtain and eavesdrop into one of their post- mortem conversations. It's also an experiment in coauthorship, with the Co-Directors of LAPP speaking as one voice! 🎭

CFP: DLC+ Presents Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture Mini-Conference: "Slop" and "Nostalgia" We are excited to announce the second installment of our Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture series, mini-conferences devoted to studying the most pressing and emerging concepts actively shap...

Check out the CFP for this pair of VIRTUAL mini-conferences on SLOP and NOSTALGIA, held by DLC+. I attended some of the previous mini-conference they put on it and it was great. Highly recommend. Keynote by the great Tess McNulty @dlcplus.org docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

So grateful for this engaged and thoughtful review of my book!

Reading With the Room: A Review of Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s ‘Reading Together’ Reading Together testifies to the contemplative mode that both books and book clubs can spark. Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s Reading Together is a book about book clubs and, quite fittingly, reads like…

Maggie Boyd reviews Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s 'Reading Together' and reflects on the democratic, indulgent good of the book club! "Reading Together testifies to the contemplative mode that both books and book clubs can spark," Boyd writes.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?: A Review of ‘The End of College Football’ It is the love that is troubling: the love of violence (which fans prefer to call “physicality”), the love of an institution that invariably, though to variable degrees, maims its participants in p…

"The main reason college football will not be abolished is the fact that people love it deeply and dearly, and they simply do not want to hear of its dark side."

What’s Love Got To Do With It?: A Review of ‘The End of College Football’ It is the love that is troubling: the love of violence (which fans prefer to call “physicality”), the love of an institution that invariably, though to variable degrees, maims its participants in p…

"The main reason college football will not be abolished is the fact that people love it deeply and dearly, and they simply do not want to hear of its dark side."

People’s Dylan Folk music’s authorlessness—or rather, the fact that its authorship is collective, resistant to the logic of individual ownership or intellectual property—facilitated the process of its transformat…

Dylan Davidson reflects on the legacy of Bob Dylan's songbook, which captured a generation's collective revolt against racial segregation and U.S. imperial aggression and which now belong to corporations hostile to those very politics.
"Folk music is about giving credit, not claiming ownership."

People’s Dylan Folk music’s authorlessness—or rather, the fact that its authorship is collective, resistant to the logic of individual ownership or intellectual property—facilitated the process of its transformat…

Dylan Davidson reflects on the legacy of Bob Dylan's songbook, which captured a generation's collective revolt against racial segregation and U.S. imperial aggression and which now belong to corporations hostile to those very politics.
"Folk music is about giving credit, not claiming ownership."

Rehearsal of the Repressed Easier to let our double do the work. For Nathan Fielder, the professional and digital cultures of our high-tech hyperreality have turned Gothic. His most recent series, The Rehearsal, coalesces ar…

In case you missed it, Matthew Moore writes about the double in Nathan Fielder's work.

"With fiction and reality explicitly blurred, The Rehearsal’s participants offload the burden of possessing a self onto their ideal doubles"

I wrote about Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and the Gothic doubles of reality tv for Mid-Theory Collective!

Rehearsal of the Repressed Easier to let our double do the work. For Nathan Fielder, the professional and digital cultures of our high-tech hyperreality have turned Gothic. His most recent series, The Rehearsal, coalesces ar…

For our first essay of the new year, Matthew Moore looks a closer look, a double take if you will, at the doppelgänger in Nathan Fielder's oeuvre and his many attempts, albeit in vain, to stage his and our doubles so we might succeed in our repression of them. Give it a read!

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MTC New Year's Letter from our editor-in-chief plus our editors' picks of 2025. Thank you everyone for helping us have a great year! See you next year and happy holidays ✨
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