Warcare Industries
K-beauty’s explosive popularity is wartime beauty recalibrating for an era of endless war, where civilians can best aid the war effort by behaving as though there isn’t one
"A sort of post-colonial studies joke": Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation
...a little bit superfluous? If my primary reference point for The Stranger is already the critique that is sometimes made of this Algerian-born French writer—the “perverse arrogance” that Achebe once...
Black Arts Boomerang
...can re-construe police brutality as "justifiable accidents", while community defense efforts are distortedly framed as resisting arrest and incitement to riot. Jordan’s question—how to settle scores, how to push the...
Preservation Society
...even bottled my own wine, but I had yet to pickle or preserve. Such kitchen arts had always seemed unduly complicated -- all paraffin, pressure cookers, and mason jars. A...
Beautiful Weapons
...mechanical zones followed by scavenging a hideous trashscape for spare parts to repair my broken Hitachi and cum my brains out. I’ve made a game about communicating nonverbally with alien...
Humid, All Too Humid
...Earthquakes in Japan, Thailand, Chile, Pakistan, Haiti, etc. were the result of global warming? Only pseudoscientists have answers, which are about as compelling as religious fanaticism. And those condemned Bangladeshis,...
Feral Memes
...interspersed with dozens of images of cats, often posing with ISIS militants. These tweets were written in humorous LOLspeak and identified their subjects, with a bit of clever wordplay, as...
Namaste Inc.
...of Indian identity. To the support center’s customers, authenticity is, well, a bit too Indian. Yet too Indian is how many Indians themselves may come to feel in certain circumstances....
Un(der)seen Cinema: Tomato Is Another Day
...as an unparalleled bit of Dadaist pranksterdom and parody whose pun-heavy critique of Hollywood writing and directing styles, at six and a half minutes long and eighty-two years old, still...
Beyond Avant-Garde
...bother to look at. And some commentators might be inclined to regard early adopters of social-media apps as avant-garde consumers, seizing on new possibilities for gratification, evasion, and status distinction....
Requiem for My Potential Hotness [Guest Post]
...my crush’s girlfriend wore. I compulsively plucked my eyebrows until they were gone. But like the slim person who looks back at old photos and thinks, I can’t believe I...
Guest Post: Gone Swimmin'—African American Women and Hair
...a portrait artist and maybe a little bit of a wannabe writer currently residing in Cleveland, Ohio. Check out her art blog at Mary-Elizabeth.net. Olympic bronze medalist Lia Neal might...
Kitchen Wisdom
...into which I could spit the offending morsel. My culinary misadventures in Chile didn't end with that bit of bull's bull-hood. Everywhere I went it seemed bad food lurked. Chicken...
Health Equity Capture
How the weight-loss industry Uses Black celebrity in the Ozempic era
Housewife Demonology
heteropessimism of the will, cruel optimism of the spirit
Mind Games Forever
...all programming, are composed of series of “transactions,” in which participants inhabit one of three “ego states,” Child, Parent, or Adult (corresponding to Freud’s id, superego, and ego). Transactional analysis...