White Bodies, Black Faces
Why do so many white people want the power to surrender their whiteness?
This Sex Which Is Not Two
Challenging the biological basis of sex and dispensing with the nature vs. nurture opposition
No Mushroom Cloud
A fungus offers a complicated lesson in late-capitalist logistics and survival. A review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World
Cap and Trade
An anthropologist explores the world of matsutake mushroom picking and what it reveals about neoliberal capitalism
Seconds of Pleasure
Phone games, listicles, masturbation booths, and the return of rational recreation
City Hunger
A 15th century book shows the entanglement of architecture and appetite
Bitter Medicine
Using mercury poisoning treatments to 'fix' autism punishes children for bearing the mark of an unhealthy society
Human Nature
A new book describing capitalism as an ecological system clarifies the stakes for ending it
Fear of Screens
Why would anyone want to believe that people who are communicating with phones have forgotten what friendship is?
Tender Potatoes
Chantal Akerman’s films show how murderous violence always lurks in the mundanity of the domestic
War Comes Home for Dinner
Since World War II, the aims of grocery shoppers, parents and the U.S. military’s Quartermaster Corps have merged
Little Big Eater Girl
Female stars embody the addictive contradictions of competitive eating
Unfit for Consumption
Thinx ads are controversial because we aren’t used to regarding women in their underwear as fully human
Tinderization of Feeling
Tinder's binary mechanism can be a template for a whole way of life in which everything is an option and processing beats choosing
Meat Market
Anthony Bourdain’s planned market in Chelsea will sell food as authenticity. That leaves little room for the democratization of cuisine he promises.
History Against the Grain
A new global story of food tracks the rise of “middling cuisine,” but neglects to read for the hungry