Groupthinkers
A review of Divining Desire (OR Books) by Liza Featherstone
Dating in the Expanded Field
...the very thing it is supposed to capture. Boomer parents bewail the hookup culture that they say has replaced dating, while their adult children stare into the abyss of Craigslist...
An Attempt at Exhausting a Movement
...rather than from the comfortable center of official culture. If an Oulipian leaves the workbench and settles into a comfortable armchair, his worldview narrows, and his work’s potential diminishes. A...
New Transcendentalist
...No physicist would dispute this.” “When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience,...
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...
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...
“Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric”: Trans Assimilation and Cringe
When the right deploys cringe to control trans assimilation, trans people cringe at each other.
Wrong Ways to Eat
...sporadic self-indulgences and self-denials, the diseases that Western culture has recently made of them. In fact, in 2011, a study conducted by doctors in Utah found that Mormons who routinely...
Seconds of Pleasure
...distracting us. A culture of distraction doesn’t stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production. Distractions only...
The Principle of Our Negative Solidarity
...undermined by an economics of competition. As Gilbert argues: Neoliberal culture works specifically to enhance our creative capacities while inhibiting any attempt to put them to work in a collective,...
A Black Jack
...culture we’ve gone from mainstream sitcoms in the 70s like The Jeffersons, which featured an unapologetically acerbic and defiantly successful George Jefferson, and Benson, whose titular character advanced from butler...
Bad Mothers
...a neo-imperialist military project. Despite arguing for the American Pietà as an understudied U.S. visual culture, Tapia deals only briefly with other so-called American Pietàs, such as the 1995 image...
Africa39: We Have New Names
...have lost, whether it is language and culture, or land and nation. And their writing is an attempt to recover a lost known object. But the Africa39 writers do not...
Line Cooked
...hurt myself had always been very encouraging and supportive of my growth as a cook. The kitchen culture there was somewhat unconventional, even slightly democratic. And the whole restaurant staff...
Us and Them
...now falls to terrorists, not novelists, to “alter the inner life of the culture.” If the attacks of the last decade have prompted many to perceive a world divided between...
The Shanzhai Lyric
...China has long been known for its vibrant counterfeit culture. The “World’s Factory” produces iPhones, Uniqlo and Gucci, but also Pardo, Muimui and Diro. “Copycat” or shanzhai brands are at...