Our January online issue features a new essay by Heather Radke considering the influence on our imaginations of the ‘utopias and dystopias that come to us through our televisions – and now our computer screens’ The architect and writer Keller Easterling, whose Extrastatecraft explores the instruments of power and resistance in the twenty-first century, contributes a short fiction, while performance artist Barbara T Smith discusses a long career and celebrating her 85th birthday with Paul McCarthy Cinephiles are advised to read our interview with David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, described by Geoff Dyer as ‘one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time’ We’re particularly excited to carry a short story  by Patty Yumi Cottrell, whose forthcoming debut novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is ‘ultimately sad as fuck’, according to Danielle Dutton, while Robert Assaye considers how the images created and shared via vast online communities of amateur artists and illustrators offer insight into a wider ‘pictorial unconscious’