Plasma Pool

Curious about the anatomy of cartoon characters? Michael Paulus imagines the X-rays of cartoon classics, while David Kawena undresses the Disney princes. An age-old agreement about art and an au courant argument about foul language. Would Eden have been more Edenic if Eve was supplanted by promiscuous plant life? YouTube video deejaying done right--even the explanation on the About page for musician Kutiman's ThruYou project is presented in the form of an artfully assembled video mash-up. Browsing through Cliff Muskiet's 800-plus-piece collection of steward/ess uniforms offers some surprising insights. Speaking of childish things best not put away: Scott Coomes admits that his experience of reading Atlas Shrugged in high school still affects his life positively today.

David Mitchell kissed his sense of social belonging goodbye as an alien among natives in Japan. If you can read in a foreign language, why wait for an American publisher to do the decent thing and commission a translation? Kevin Hilke on Tim Geithner, a planner's planner. Joseph Cotten is the great American actor: He inevitably falls in love with things he can’t have or doesn’t understand, but he never quite gives up, long after the dream is already behind him. But maybe he should. Plasma Pool contributor Lee Konstantinou, author of the new novel Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire, predicts the end of the world. Will it come before Pynchon's new novel? Or will Inherent Vice follow through on Darren Franich's suspicions about Against the Day?

Ted Soloratoff's career in literary and political editing holds lessons for social engineers and psychotic queers alike; David Brooks, sans-evidence, says young progressives don't think things through. Uh, not quite. David Rothkopf thinks American foreign policy is a parade of unintended consequences, but denies the policy of engagement that could allow us to better direct them, says John Collins; and Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein examines problems of selective interventions in complex systems: is advance planning prudent or inherently ignorant? As David Graeber says, even if we don’t understand how our interventions affect things, we'd be foolish to assume that they don't--something Jacques-Alain Miller says crisis friendly psychoanalysis has long understood.

Not even theorists talking about theorists do theory anymore, but Lauren Caldwell still wants to put theory to work and Slavoj Zizek thinks this recession is the perfect time for it. What if novels are all theory has left? Either way, haven’t novels been doing the real theoretical heavy-lifting? As for the essay form, “its concepts are not derived from a first principle, nor do they fill out to become ultimate principles.” Darren Franich argues that we shouldn’t be looking to Southland Tales for pertinent insights on the way real people live, because there are no real people in the movies. In addition to humans, perhaps cinema needs more manifestos.