One If by Land, Two If by Sea
To turn the U.S.-Mexico border into the Border, America had to erase its Caribbean history
Paranoia at the Disco
Once largely derided as shallow, faddish consumerist music, disco has been reappraised as the stifled sounds of cultural liberation. Of course, it could always be both.
Permission Slips
Social media have made the street-photographer ethic of seizing moments without consent seem unsustainable
Philosophers of Babel
The Dictionary of Untranslatables offers proof that ideas like “democracy,” “revolution,” “politics,” and even “existence” translate easily from County Cork to Kyiv
Capital Flows
The story of rap, art, and money doesn’t and can’t end with white people getting ahold of it
Bad News
With Bystander, Liz Magic Laser seems to tell us that news media is unreliable, irrelevant and preys on our emotions. But the intended audience for whom this might be startling is hard to imagine.
Serf Boards
Are crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as bleak as the company’s shipping warehouses?
No Choice but Freedom
Markets enact social control while making it seem to disappear
No Purchase Necessary
Is liking brands ironically on social media a form of click fraud?
The Paper Chase
Online cryptocurrencies are all the rage, but other alternate money systems can do more than help you hide
Manufactured Response
I spent most of my life trying to Americanize myself, but all of that rebelliousness melted away when the earthquake hit
Disgorge the Cash
Companies used to borrow in the markets as a last resort for financing investment in their business. Now it’s a front for shareholder giveaways
The Art of Antarctic Cooking
It's a dog-eat-dog world down there at the South Pole
Get the Balance Right
A new biography of Walter Benjamin stumbles on the problem his writing addressed: how to write history without taking the victor’s perspective
The Postcapital Economy
China’s command-like economy may be better suited to cope with technologically driven abundance
In a Mirror, Darkly
A review of Helen Oyeyemi's novel Boy, Snow, Bird