The Dandelion and the Lucky Peach
...The column starts off with Bourdain recounting the basics of Chang’s biography: “After becoming disenchanted with work in the financial-services sector, Chang traveled to Japan to teach English and study...
Alienated Nerds
NFTs as gentrified fandom and the destruction of cultural autonomy in the digital age
Field Notes on Fashion and Occupy (Part Two)
...as he strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint stain of personal shame and commiseration rose to his own face. Angry with himself he tried to...
"Organic stories"
...what really matters to Facebook — that you feed it likes and comments and so on. It's going to rig your feed to extort the most interaction (a.k.a. free immaterial...
The Development Imaginary: Tracks*
...most is the effect the development imaginary has had on our freedom dreams. The development imaginary has hobbled our thinking. It continues to limit our dreams. It cannot teach us...
Sunday Reading
...on the Internet Backslash Scott's Weekend Reading ReclaimUC: I owe reclaimUC an email, which has gone politely unmentioned by reclaimUC. On gift horses and Trojan horses: The proposed aquatics center...
MoW Memorandum
...a community-based arts and culture non-profit organization in Houston’s northern Third Ward, one of the city’s oldest African American neighborhoods. We are also interested in the network of participatory budget...
Beautiful Music
...It's surprisingly hard to find music about personal appearance that isn't, like, gross (though never fear, there's plenty of objectification odes on here, see also Roy Orbison), but I...
Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Little Girl?
...terms of easily defined tasks: kill giant demon samurai, kill the androids from iRobot, kill ogres and dragons straight out of Tolkien. This all has something to do with sexy...
Our Star Wars Holiday Special
...terrible. They were marred by horrific writing and joyless characters, of course, but those superficial failings pale in comparison (or resulted from) the more fundamental underlying problem: they tried so...
Graphic Interface
...at the end of the 20th century, to a present-based culture now. It’s funny. That talk you and I had after Zuccotti about the letdown of Obama after all that...
Cruel Poptimism
Ariana Grande’s hit single “No Tears Left to Cry” might be the late-summer cipher for living in a lost future
We Will Never Get Away From The Sprawl
...itself rebellious. Musical culture starting in the mid-1960s helped to expose the suburban fantasy as a hollow and manipulative myth. But that figuration is somewhat worn out half a century...
What's the Matter With the Modern World: Jonathan Franzen
...hypocrisies stretched over soon-to-be-catastrophic contradictions, which she was bent on unmasking with her prose. The paragraph may come down harder on Latin culture than on American, but Kraus was actually...
Can the White Girl Twerk?
...bondage-inspired Versace. She’s taken cues from Rihanna and hip-hop culture at large and added gold chains, even a grill. Sixteen-year-old Miley had never heard a Jay Z song (despite the...
Death by Association
Calling on “black cyberpunk,” Roy Christopher’s book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future bestows the genre with a ghostly pallor, risking its political potential