Short Circuit
...for popular storytelling in the broad culture and hip storytelling among the cinerati. But for most of us, the film might as well be a tree falling in one of...
Sunday Reading: April 30, 2023
...Silicon Valley demonstrate how venture capital culture trained a generation of people to build and fund apps, not sustainable businesses––and then marry those apps to industries a lot more complex...
Beauty Blogosphere 6.8.12
...the ways that we've transformed celebrities into objects. It's a case study of culture-wide objectification: "Listen, I enjoy pop culture. I like movies and television, and I like pop music,...
Open Channels
...Sue/Marty Stu character. But Cho doesn’t stop at experimenting with different identities—aspects of his own subjectivity go with him, flooding the characters he inhabits. In “The Sound of Music,” for...
Hal
Delayed reflections on Jim Jarmusch and Talal Asad
Paranoia lost
...can and probably should investigate anyone, rationalizing a social hermeneutics of suspicion through the provision of the means to execute it. Paranoia is built into the culture, to the extent...
Caruso Sings The Vowels
...The great Enrico Caruso taking us through the vowels as shown in Caruso's Method of Voice Production: the Scientific Culture of the Voice (1922) by Pasqual Mario Marafioti. When...
Sunday Reading
...the ambiguities of folklore, history, culture. Names, Trains, and Corporate Deals: Why Public Transit Shouldn’t Sell Naming Rights What to Read Next Batman wins the Cold War Not-quite-lost shadows Imperialistic...
The Devil’s Playground
On wondering over sexual memory, and the pressure to conform to dominant narratives of violation
Pretty/Funny (Guest Post)
...MNN Lifestyle Channel October 3 at 2 p.m., and on MNN’s Culture Channel October 7 at 10:30. It will also be live-streamed on MNN.org during those times. (And if you...
Data Occupations
...one thing a community with such strong roots in maker culture is not good at, it’s obediently following directions and obliging designers’ intentions: To thine own self be true. Quantified...
TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism
...Death of the Player •Celia Pearce & Friends: Experimental Game Design • • • Straight White Males: Video Game Media and Gaming Culture •Maddy Myers: Gaming, rape culture, and how...
Unacceptable Bodies
...cases, Ashley’s case illustrates that the very language we use to describe and justify medical and ethical decision making comes from and reinforces a culture of medicalization. Key to creating...
Batman Occupied
...the serial killers and terrorists, and they too are becoming stale in their repetition. Jameson, however, is wrong about politics being forbidden in mass culture. The Dark Knight Rises is...
Philosophers of Babel
...funding to match: Eurothink at its academic best. Why else would the culture czars of Paris and Brussels who’ve brought you the yearly European Culture Capitals (Umeå, anyone?) and Quaero...
Tim Burton's "Big Eyes"
...secret (an open secret, apparently) — "from her own daughter!" even. He capitalizes on a sexist culture to take credit for Margaret's ability, and then uses the specter of that...