Days Spent Doing Too Much of Fucking Nothing
...Price Is Right was on in the dayroom. I tried to play along, but just kept thinking about how this place is wrong.” Lil Wayne’s Gone ‘Til November is, in...
Symbolic Threats
Flag worship hides the violence and division that truly shape a nation
The Life and Death of the Graveyard Shift
...times I tried to convince them that their meal came to $8.47, they could not trust me, and steadfastly refused to take the correct change from a $20. I ended...
The Albatross Around Johnny Depp's Brain
...Apparently Johnny Depp tried to recreate the top picture in portraying Tonto, and produced the bottom picture. Take a minute to observe his interpretation: photos via Entertainment Weekly. Jessica...
Volume 30
...acceleration and its discontents, reactionary messaging in mass culture, the art and publishing world and their rituals, love as a problem, surveillance and affect, apps and neoliberalism. Essentially: how can...
Values, Stereotypes, and Big Feelings: Compliments, Part II
...recognize that it has value. Otherwise, the compliment isn’t complete.) The consequence here is that compliments can tell us a good deal about what we as a culture actually value....
Occupy A Bank
...to start sitting down inside those banks. #OccupyLA has already tried this, and members got arrested after trying to cash a $673 billion dollar check to “the people of California.”...
Beauty Work and Intrinsic Motivation
...not particularly helpful advice to someone who's trying to make exercise a habit, though, so I tried to remember what got me to the point of workouts being habit. A...
Editors' Note, Vol. 30: Volume 30
...discontents, reactionary messaging in mass culture, the art and publishing world and their rituals, love as a problem, surveillance and affect, apps and neoliberalism. Essentially: how can we express ourselves,...
Demolition Party
...economic stimulus of consumer culture to urbanization; these shiny new cities that are going up across the country today are like new refrigerators which are designed to break down after...
Can’t See the Wood for the Trees
Are trees worth more standing or chopped down as wood? From Marx’s analysis of wood theft to carbon credit programs, the value of forests as assets continues to shift.
Death by Twitter
...the writing of Flaubert, Gide, Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. In Francophone literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture. But though a version of it was present...
Revolutionary Laughter
...novel almost every decade. He was friends with Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell and Jean Genet and, although he wrote almost exclusively about Egypt, was firmly ensconced in Left Bank culture,...
The Selfless Man
...Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) by teaching him the art of the pickup, training him to dress fashionably, drink like an alpha male, and make woman-pleasing small talk. “Be better than...
Achilles 2.0
...his former comrade-in-arms Tihomir Blaskic, who was tried for war crimes at The Hague: …I thought about what I would have said if they had questioned me, how I would...
This Week in Art Crime
...I am the guy responsible for the exhibition, that we have brought shame on the Ukraine people. I tried to explain that we show also the killed [Euromaidan] protesters, but...