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What the Future Was
15 curated works.
15 works available.
Curated works
Routes through What the Future Was
15 works selected across all media.
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Albums in this field
Music
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Carries a strong pull into film through after-hours and longing.

Music
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?
Carries a strong pull into film through after-hours and longing.
Interpretive layer
Idea lines behind this surface
Bring interpretation forward so the route reads with more clarity, pressure, and argument.
Essays
The Queer Art of Failure
Carries a strong pull into books through migration and South Asia.
Essays
The Future of Nostalgia
Carries a strong pull into film through modernity and South Asia.
Cultural geography
Regional constellations

Television
The Leftovers
Carries a strong pull into books through urban isolation and South Asia.
Film
What We Do in the Shadows
Carries a strong pull into books through memory and urban isolation.
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Books · Strong bridge
What Katy Did
1870s
What Katy Did is a 1872 book by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, linked to United States and English. It keeps the reading field grounded in identifiable authorship and place.
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Music · Strong bridge
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?
1990s
Wonderwall and Don't Look Back in Anger. Britpop's biggest album from Manchester.
Film · Strong bridge
What We Do in the Shadows
2010s
What We Do in the Shadows is a 2014 film from New Zealand, associated with Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. It keeps a wider cinema field of scale, memory, and regional contrast in view without reducing the title to a bare metadata shell.
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Essays · Strong bridge
The Future of Nostalgia
2000s
"Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? What happens to Old World memories in a New World order? Do we even know what we are nostalgic for?". "Combining philosophical essay, aesthetic analysis and personal memoir, Boym explores the spaces of collective nosta...
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Television 2010s
For All Mankind
What if the Soviets reached the moon first? Alternate history as space drama.
Books 2010s
The Lonely City
"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. What...
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Music 1960s
Let It Bleed
Gimme Shelter and You Can't Always Get What You Want. The end of the 1960s in two songs.
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Film 2000s
The Lives of Others
A Stasi officer surveils a playwright and is changed by what he hears. Power and conscience.
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Essays 2010s
The Queer Art of Failure
"The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to con...
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Books 2010s
An Era of Darkness
What the British did to India. The costs of colonialism argued with precision and controlled rage.