Sunday Reading: August 6, 2023
...of the most talked-about writers in the nation, and in this book, he puts forward a stunning new theory about the culture war that could turn our debates upside down....
Vol. 17 Editors' Note: Rules of the Game
...are always encouraged, as long as they’re not deployed against the logic of the game. This reaches an apotheosis in contemporary work culture: Be creative! We’ve got a pool table...
Faked in China
...where unscrupulous business practices sully the intellectual property of hardworking Euro-American brand owners, or attempt to offer a “cultural” explanation—that is, a racist one, holding Chinese culture as incapable of...
Class Consciousness for American Doctors
Professionalism is the ideological terrain on which medicine’s culture interacts with its class politics
Top or Bottom: How do we desire?
What do queer memes of a top shortage reveal about the racialized orders of desire and new directions for gay critique?
It has always been profound to me that the brass ring is a brass ring.
...come to be seen as both the precursor and hallmark of success. And so also the object of imitation. Hence our present culture of imitation. In this culture a successful...
Games
...reaches an apotheosis in contemporary work culture: Be creative! We’ve got a pool table and a beer fridge and a big open office without cubicles and no benefits and an...
Very Serious Populists
...(some of whom are moderators) may not see an article dissecting rape culture as something that “contributes to the conversation” of r/comedy. The voting system is left as the proving...
Life on Autopilot
An interview with Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley, a memoir about the tech-bro universe’s notions of progress
The Enduring Legacy of Basquiat’s Hair
...European art gallery. They’re both the brash play of traditionally irreconcilable worlds, increasingly common in modern culture, thanks to those who pushed barriers in the past. Abdul Abasi of Nepenthes...
Lessons of Engagement
...of extinction. Schooled in French and its imperial culture, Adnan was drawn at a young age to Lebanon’s local language and poetry, which she was discouraged from learning. (She said...
The New Somali Studies
...arrived in Zeila, his first stop before traveling through the rest of Somaliland and the broader Horn of Africa. He was keenly interested in the culture, beliefs, and practices of...
Real Inauthentic Like
...on the idea of an “ailing literary culture,” lamenting that each and every novel published now clamors to be heard like church bells rung by wild sugar high children: “All...
Ambiguity City
The Neighborhood Politics of Big Tech in Berlin
On Neuronationalism: Autism, Immunity, Security
...Jain’s pronouncement that, ‘‘all of us in American risk culture live to some degree in prognosis.” Prognosis, a trajectory which maps the likely outcome of pathogenic danger, structures national crises...
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
...is an art form that tells us as much about Balinese culture as ethnographic chestnuts like kinship structures or gift giving. The cockfight “is, for the Balinese, a kind of...