Swarovski Kristallnacht
...however small, to align yourself with a certain ideology, culture, community. There is no opting out of getting dressed. But in our post–“Punk: Chaos to Couture” reality, it appears as...
The Enduring Popularity of the Suntan
...of material luxury, a tan represents that we have the luxury to be connected to both nature and culture simultaneously. Tourism boards use tanning in their materials: “The bourgeois on...
The Flies That Bind
...of the ghetto." The child and the corpse are gathered. And opposite them, at the antipode of the human alive or dead, trash itself walks, all across culture, enmonstered. This...
Fact Check!
...the fact-checkers I’ve ever known just didn't want to be responsible for inaccuracies. The people Gopnik cites were nevertheless onto something. A new culture of fact-checking is emerging in the...
The Science of Life as Art and Dissent
...include eighteenth-century aesthetic theory/philosophy, poetry, art history, media, and music. Currently Chris teaches for the Department of English and School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. Contact: [email protected]; http://theboundingline.com/....
The Acquisitive Gaze
...of commodities. "What modern consumer culture produces," Agnew argues, "is not so much a way of being as a way of seeing — a way best characterized as visually acquisitive....
No SWAT Zone
Resisting police militarization under Trump.
Why are we still talking about the “naughty nurse”?
...the 20th. Second, they are even more surprised that the history of nursing is much more complicated than one might imagine given depictions of nurses in popular culture. Images of...
Growing Up TV
...cult of personality in pop culture: We truly have commodified our entertainers’ personal lives. And they’ve largely accepted it, because the privilege of a society’s attention is, I imagine, a...
Swimming Class
...bounds of public decency. This raucous swimming culture was tolerated in natural waters, but city officials wanted none of it in the new artificial waters. They made rules against all...
Improving on Silence
...mere silence, but you have to come out and sing hosannas to the guy.) We must fight rape culture, even in its allegedly mild manifestations, we must be grieved with...
We Call It a Dismantling Process
Three South Carolina inmates call attention to egregious conditions ahead of a nationwide prison strike
The Accidental Audience
...describe themselves as viewers and/or creators of culture in general? Prosumer seems the most accurate. For artists using social media like Tumblr, the question is not whether their involvement constitutes...
Zombie Novel
...state. Comeuppance for a flatlined culture.” Despite the lieutenant’s protestations, this righteous punishing nature is exactly God, he is Deuteronomy’s Jehovah, dealing out suffering and destruction for perceived infidelity. But...
Emergency Supplies
...galore). And together with Poetry Parnassus itself, it emphasized the idea of poetry, and culture more broadly, as diplomacy, as a kind of annex of international relations (peace on Earth;...
Urban Planting
...Bartle Frere, the governor of Bombay in the mid 1800s. Frere managed his city under the premise that “even Indians could be properly civilized through exposure to Western culture and...