Punk Isn't
Asking “What is punk?” is the wrong question. The answer inevitably makes itself wrong
Straight to Hells
A review of Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells
Burning Man Is Grey
The best way I can think to describe the experience is that people who went to Burning Man changed color.
The Sound and the Fury
When political factions divided Jamaica, sound systems were caught in the cross-fire
Super Position
These “heroes” are purely reactionary, in the literal sense. They have no projects of their own.
Reign of the Techno-Nanny
Before we eagerly welcome smartphone decisionmaking technologies, we should consider the consequences of apps that serve as our moral guide
Econospeak
At a time when much of the world is mired by recession, and unemployment is hitting record highs, it’s not surprising that we’d want experts unafraid to make sense of it all. Enter the pop-economist.
Rank and File Countrypolitan
When country musicians tried to protect the integrity of their genre in the 1970s against the likes of John Denver, it wasn’t merely aesthetic protest but an organized labor movement
The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock
If an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock — for if she hasn’t, she will only know about being shocked inescapably.
Dragged Down by the Stone
Pink Floyd's Animals: Most depressing album ever, or call to "cruel optimism?"
A Black Jack
ABC’s new series Last Resort presents race in a fashion that is entirely bracing, especially given the other options in the faux-post-racial mediaverse that we now inhabit.
The Last Cat
Where Zarathustra defined the letzte mensch as the man so despicable he is incapable of despising himself, the lolcat is incapable of despising his master. Lo! I show you the age of the last cat.
American Saints
The loud salvation rhetoric of the entrepreneur drowns out other valuable perspectives about labor, initiative, and enterprise.
The Man Who Saved Prospect Park
The career of 19th-century writer, illustrator and naturalist William Hamilton Gibson reminds modern urbanites that all conservation, like politics, is local
Thinking Objectively
India is a bazaar of thingness where stuff proliferates in excess of any attempts at categorization. The stacks, bundles, and piles yield another mode of looking, unknown at the factory or supermarket.
Miéville's Anticlimaxes
Miéville is less interested in characters and plots than genre itself, which becomes the main character of his novels