Cruel Pessimism
A new book on debt reminds us that we have not left the time of crisis yet
Community Slander
...York Times. Buffington, who founded Yik Yak with his fraternity brother Tyler Droll, sees their app as a corrective to the (micro)celebrity culture of Twitter. On Yik Yak, they claim,...
“I do wish mother had a boudoir:” Hertha Ayrton’s Home Laboratory
...were not necessarily complementary in engineering at the turn of the 20th century. Further reading Elizabeth Bruton. “The life and material culture of Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923): suffragette, physicist, mathematician...
Fear, Pain, and the Representation of Women’s Wartime Trauma
...psychology specifically, and medicine more generally, was used to reinforce gender and culture norms. Even though trauma related to air raids was a widespread and prevalent cause of incarceration in...
Playing With Death
...roleplaying game that began with 1980’s Rogue and emerged from the culture of tabletop, dice ‘n’ graph paper dungeoneering. The roguelike’s key characteristics are randomly generated environments and "permadeath" –...
The Science of What Makes Pain So Personal
...to ways of experiencing the environment that vary according to the perceptual modulation of the individual.” In other words, Petrie surmised, something more innate than culture and willpower determines how...
Single Servings
...desirable is conditioned by culture. Slater, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and current Fast Company contributor, repackages those banal truisms as vaguely alarming yet exciting developments. “New means of...
The Journalist and the Suicide
...a culture of therapy whose super-coddling, super-encouraging style verges on patronizing. Accounts like Finkel’s convey a general sense of the problem. This many months on the VA waitlist, that much...
The Future Is Female
...spy culture of the Second World War. The melancholy of generational irrelevance is present everywhere in Tinker. Here, we see the contemplative hero as forced retiree: beekeeper, constant gardener, chess...
The Future Is Femme
...point when the rational neoliberal approach to intelligence collection ousted the honor-bound gentlemanly spy culture of the Second World War. The melancholy of generational irrelevance is present everywhere in Tinker....
Beauty Blogosphere 6.22.12
...hasn't nevermind. Geekery 101: I've seen snippets of some not-great news about sexism in geek culture lately, but since I fall more on the dork end of the spectrum than...
The Origins of American Women’s Exercise
...variations in embodiment or identity. Further Reading: Todd, Jan. Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870 . Mercer University Press, 1998. Verbrugge,...
Live Through This
...more often than women. But our culture is unable to address rape with the sobriety and clarity the topic deserves because we are still unable to address sex with the...
Naming Nameless
...group’s tedious chat logs within a global context of activism and Internet culture. At the same time, Coleman, possibly inadvertently, provides a broader snapshot of a generation’s misbegotten coping mechanisms...
Weird Corporate Twitter
...American culture on his blog. The voice of Carles's Twitter account was something like that of a perpetually wry and mercurial teenager talking affectionately to his friends. "H8 U" he...
Full-Time Daughter
...love white masculinity. There may well be suicidal femmes in non-white culture, but the pop-culture Beautiful Girl Who Longs For Death is paradigmatically white. She could take her pick of...