Temporary to Permanent
Nothing threatens capitalism’s best excuse for itself — that it is the economic system best suited to individual liberty and human flourishing — more than…
No Man Righteous
Bob Dylan’s reactionary album Slow Train Coming exemplifies fundamentalism’s alluring promise of the escape from identity.
The Tourist Sublime
When we travel, the meanings consumerism ascribes to objects become opaque, and the choices we have to make — where to eat, where to go, what to do — can abruptly seem arbitrary, pointless. The ubiquitous marketing discourse that normally serves to orient us instead prompts terror in the midst of plenty. The consumerist bounty
Open Books: The E-Reader Reads You
E-books promise not a plenitude of ideas and narratives but a wealth of information to better rationalize the unpredictable behavior of readers. E-readers make us into the content.
Reading Slowly
(via) “Wordsworth claims that ‘the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ It seems to me…
SEO & The Disappearing Self
(via) “On Facebook, our communication is assessed like online advertising — how many click-throughs did it inspire? This prompts us to make what we say…
Love Worth Fighting For
More than ever, we now need to think of love as ennobling resistance to what alreadyis, modeling the idea that difficult things are worth the…
Spontaneity On Demand
Salvador Dalí. A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds (1936) “Mediating our identity and our experience recapitulates it in a form that can circulate and be…
children are our future: resistance, addiction and the digital natives
It’s easy enough to amass anecdotal evidence of rising internet addiction. The marathon Asian gamers who prefer to starve rather than leave their terminal; the…
Demoting Beauty
Our response to beauty is our heart volunteering us for the gentlest form of domination.
Power and the Pickup Artist
Rather than establish a spontaneous, open-ended and reciprocal relation with another person, the pickup artists want to assure that interpersonal exchanges follow a rigid script that culminates in sex