"With his latest masterwork, Dennis Broe confirms what some of us already knew: when it comes to parsing and interrogating popular culture, he has no peer."-- Gerald Horne, American Book Award Winner for
Dawning of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism in the Long Sixteenth Century
"Broe's mastery of history, economics, and media let him provide details and insights that few other writers can match. These short, readable essays offer convincing explanations of the moment in which we live."—Julia Lesage, Co-founder and editor of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
"Dennis Broe is one of the most acute critics working today. He has an astounding capacity to reach beyond a specific medium to give us wide-ranging yet deep social, cultural, and economic contexts. A triumph"—Toby Miller, author of
A Covid Charter, a Better World
Foreward by Redacted Tonight's Lee Camp
Diary of a Digital Plague Year
is a blow-by-blow account of the 2020 confinement charting the changes in our lives exacerbated by the coronavirus. Corona Culture is a digital culture extraordinaire for some, while for others it increased panic and terror about being at work.
The privileged site for this exploration is Serial TV and its new mode of delivery, the increased power of the streaming services as they attempt to dominate and even throttle global TV production. The year's highs and include: "John Brown's Maid," on the travesty that was The Good Lord Bird; "Coming Undone: The Limits of MeToo" and Nicole Kidman's power walks in The Undoing; and "Battling '50s Apartheid One Monster at a Time" in the majestic Lovecraft Country. The year is also recounted in essays on film, art, books and Euro- and American Cultural Politics, all the while asking if there are ways of turning this new phase of Digital Disaster Capitalism into a more liberatory (Virtual) Road Ahead.
Dennis Broe is also the author of
Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure
and
Maverick or How The West Was Lost.
His TV series blog is
Bro on The Global Television Beat.
His radio commentary can be heard on
Breaking Glass
on Art District Radio in Paris and on
Arts Express
on the Pacifica Network in the U.S. He is the author of two '40s detective novels:
Left of Eden
, about the Hollywood blacklist and
A Hello to Arms
, about the postwar buildup of the weapons industry. He is an arts critic and Paris correspondent for the British daily
Morning Star
and for
Crime Time, People's World
Culture Matters
, where he is an Associate Editor.