Running on Empty
With the FuelBand, Nike has built something that's supposed to get people moving. For all the wrong reasons.
Solving Happiness
When we start quantifying happiness, whose grins count?
Footnote Fairy Tale
Francis Spufford's Red Plenty presents us with an alternative timeline that failed to materialize: the triumph of Soviet central planning over Western capitalism through cybernetics. Could it have been?
The Secret Shopper
“Inattentive,” “rude,” and “dumb” service workers damage the value of their bosses’ product in subtle acts of psycho-social sabotage so pervasive that an entire industry of mystery shoppers has sprung up to combat it
Reviving Cabiria
Fellini is most known for his surrealism in La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, but the most revolutionary idea he contributed to cinema was to render a complicated female character in a comedic role like Cabiria.
Everybody Have Fun Tonight
LMFAO’s music provides an endless party with no real cause for celebration, turning fun into a forced march through the hyperreal
Model Behavior
[r]Image by imp kerr[/r] Gender determines the shape of our fantasies. Good little boys are supposed to dream about changing the world, but good little girls are…
Desiring Machines
The various tendencies subsumed under the New Aesthetic label point to a future in which the objects of our affection develop affection for us
Reality Fiction
Fragments on Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be? including an interview with the author
Alone Again Or
Shelia Heti’s first story collection, newly released in the U.S., catalogs the enduring stakes of gender in the rigged game of heterosex
How Bad Is It?
In his three-volume survey of America's fall, Morris Berman seeks the source of our civilization’s decline in its innermost principle. What he finds at the bottom of our nation's soul is … hustling.
Old King Coal
The future came to Kentucky the same way industrial capitalism arrives anywhere: by demoralizing labor, exploiting natural resources, and capturing local government.
Sickening Waste
Anne Carson's Antigonick
All Eyez on Not-Me
Coachella’s Tupac hologram marked the end of the singular experience
Circle of Presence
Smartphones pre-empt the possibility of conversation even before we choose to look at them and look away from the person speaking to us.
The Lonely Ones
By all accounts, Susan Sontag found being alone intolerable. Solitude is a problem for writers generally, and men are often worse at being alone than women.