The Demographic Shadow

In my 2022 post on Soylent Green, I traced how the film’s revelation, “Soylent Green is people,” dramatically literalized overpopulation as self‑consumption, a horror that lingers because it feels both absurd and, from an ecological perspective, plausible. That image was a cultural zygote: mutating into other forms of demographic dread across decades. In 2025, weContinue reading “The Demographic Shadow”

Emmanuel Todd

Gail Kelly had us read Emmanuel Todd’s, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, shortly after it was first released in 1985. She loved the breadth of the work and I recall her musing, “Mr. Barker, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be French? To be so certain you were right?” That Gallic confidence – nay,Continue reading “Emmanuel Todd”