Collector's Item
...Material Culture of Music," argues that this built-up sediment of unwanted culture demystifies collectibles in general: In the ways in which they accumulate, and in the fact that they sit...
Precarious Verse
...of speech but that of poetry, speech transfigured by communion with music, notes sounded in clear vowels. Poetry as speech transfigured — which is to say, speech elevated above merely...
Why We Love Sociopaths
...evening news. On a certain level, this trend may not seem like anything new. It seems as though most cultures have lionized ruthless individuals who make their own rules, even...
Nostalgia for the Future
...he packed my bag of DVDs, that I do not pay for it. Early Palestinian cinema and its consequent visual culture sought to give, to the world, an image of...
Collateral Damage
...means to be a writer in the precarious economy and how it has changed the nature of written culture and book reviewing. *** Willie Osterweil: One thing I’d like to...
Nerd Crushed: Where Are the Average-Looking Female "Sex Symbols"?
...with nerd culture in the sense that they go to Comic Con. Then there are the women who have been christened as “the thinking man’s sex symbol,” like Tina Fey,...
Centuries in Sorry
Reparations begin in the body
The Ahmeds in America, Part One
...Islam as religion - not culture, not politics, not music, not poetry - just Islam. And that too, a particular kind of religion - one that obsesses over the veil,...
The Ahmeds in America, Part I
...in terms of Islam as religion - not culture, not politics, not music, not poetry - just Islam. And that too, a particular kind of religion - one that obsesses...
Dry Bones Breathe
...all the glories and contradictions of black culture, religions and politics. There’s a record of the black struggle over the course of the 20th century, a tension between the South...
Creepshots and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of "Free Speech"
...we understand and describe ourselves to have a common social interest in promoting, protecting, or criminalizing something. Legal culture not only describes how and where the actual law is enforced—such...
Woody Allen’s Good Name
...start by assuming she’s lying,” except in a rape culture, and if you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured. It works both ways, or...
Next Year in Tehran
...Israel came only two years after the release of his seminal work, Westoxification (also translated as “Occidentosis”), a condemnation of the invasion of Western culture under the Pahlavi regime and...
Security Culture Is Good
...are bare-minimum security requirements for anyone using modern communications tools. • Download HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger for your browser. • Turn on two-factor authentication for all your social media...
Cartooning the Body
...a child’s supposedly passive consumption of whatever content is aimed at them, cartoons trace a political horizon defined by the profound absence of alternative possibilities. Within the globalized consumer culture,...
Praying in The Closet
...countercultural energy, Are You Running doesn’t fit easily into our common categories of how queer sexuality, mainstream Christianity, and popular culture typically intersect. It’s not lavishly excessive; it’s not homophobic;...