Before it was Zuccotti Park, it was Liberty Plaza Park. The old name reflected the realities of Manhattan real estate, binding the park by association to the building that stands just north of it: One Liberty Plaza, a 54-story tower that necessitated the park’s very existence. The Park formerly known as Liberty Plaza, surfaced in

The logic of anti–hate crime legislation is seductively easy to support, but it fails to account for the hate built into law enforcement

Hello Kitty is the international emblem of cute, which is among the most powerful forces capitalism has to marshal consumer troops for the system’s reproduction. Can she still be redeemed as an anticapitalist icon?

TED talks are the Urban Outfitters of the ideas world

A review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

Sometimes it’s said that we’re all Nietzscheans now. From cultural studies to continental philosophy, Nietzsche's ideas aren’t so much studied as presupposed; they’re part of the deep grammar of those disciplines, part of the furniture. These days, disquieting Nietzschean insights like, say, perspectivism (the idea that there are no facts, only interpretations) have come to

Like the flâneur, we weren’t working, or doing anything decent or useful; we even recognized our uselessness as a kind of radical generationality, and wore it like a bad handle. The Arcade was the original iron-and-glass shopping mall, and the flâneur — affluent, indolent, and out for a good wasted time - was the original

Ryan Gosling’s lack of substance makes him the go-to heartthrob for ideological indoctrination

Beckett's "Fail better" is now experimental literature's equivalent of the famous Che Guevara photo: a successful brand with no particular owner

In a post-digital world, the Named garment achieves something our social networks cannot. We may never meet the three-dimensional version of our complete online cohort. But Minnie has a name. Order her. She’ll arrive at your door. Touch her. Smell her. She’s real. She’s yours.

Don’t do it for the children     I don’t want you to think I don’t like children. I do. I number among the insufferable…

The appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan seems to exempt one from such constraints and anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes by advertising them. No matter how counterintuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone. How