2. Consumed by Abstraction
...one another. The stock market. ICE is a bit more complex, or one level more abstracted, in that its principal business is to administrate the sales of derivatives. Derivatives, as...
Beauty Blogosphere, Ides of March
..."I was wearing my second-nicest tights and a bit of makeup and holding a recorder, and hence appeared old enough and professionally polished enough to be someone they felt the...
Incomplete, Visionary, Non-Utopian
For María Lugones
Where Nothing Can Possibly Go “Worng”
...the New York Times, a glitch? Or were America’s liberals simply more comfortable imagining that misogyny, racism, and xenophobia hadn’t been so deeply programmed into American political life? If we...
We Can Do It!: Rosie the Swiffer
...With No Name you're carrying? In other words: Rosie the Riveter was a bit of propaganda created to refashion the idea of conventional femininity. Which is exactly how Procter...
Melancholic Damage
...of good-girl resilience: Clarkson comes off as a bit more bruised and experienced, probably because she is older and more seasoned (and, notably, reads somewhat less bourgeois than Swift). Her...
When Blogger Comes Marching Home
...clothes, and it could affect my level of comfort in my own body. I'm not talking being artifically slim; I've found my "happy weight," and when I began writing the...
The Ellipsis That Told the Tale
Until 1969, there were several attacks on the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno during the student riots in Germany. This story takes place 30 years later, when the roots and conflicts that fueled the incidents are still being felt in a daughter who is reassembling fact and fiction dating back to 250 AD in an attempt
Hunger Gamesmanship
...and comfortably could now be saved by the factory owner, or spent on himself. Of course, he still needed workers to manage the machines. But only unskilled workers, and not...
The Difference between Chéri and Eternity
...an account book, naked near the fountain, naked in Lea’s brass-laden bed. Chéri is naked wearing Lea’s pearl choker: “It looks every bit as good on me as it does...
So French
...The eternally moisturized Frenchwoman. (By loki11, via Wikimedia Commons) The Frenchwoman's beauty routine. (Because there's just the one woman - rich, Parisian, works in fashion - and...
Toward a Reading of Post-Kanye Hip-Hop
...The particularity of swagger’s performance lies in its combination of material signifiers of wealth, particularly designer-brand clothing or jewelry, with bodily gestures or attitudes of defiance, as in the strut...
It's Hip to Eat Mare
...Sometimes you could get a ton of meat from one Percheron [a type of horse]! Replaced by tractors, cars, and other mechanical devices, laboring horses have been rendered completely useless,...
CHAT ROOM: Activist Microcelebrities
...attention economy. rob: This strays from the paper’s parameters a bit, but the point of engaging in activism can be to escape the constraints of "attention," and its scarcity, into...
Lying Like Cuttlefish
...one another. Against these fantasies, we must learn how to comport ourselves anew, to squirm for a bit in an effort to fight for a life lived in common....
Hillbilly Ethnography
...his readers will not see class through “a racial prism,” but quickly goes on to say: “There is undoubtedly an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story.” Hillbillies,...